Survival and Development: The Ecological Foundations of the Wealth of Nations

Why did it take four millenia to get from invention of the horse-drawn wagon to the first bicycle, but once the bicycle was invented the jump to the automobile, the airplane, and jet aircraft all occurred within a single human lifetime?  Why did all the mechanical, chemical, electrical, legal, financial, organizational, educational, and political technologies that underpinned the first bicycles, automobiles, airplanes, and jet aircraft emerge from a small set of societies located in the temperate latitudes between Poland and the United States?  More puzzling still, why could the rest of the world not simply copy those (and other Modern Era) technologies, such that the technological leaders of the 1800s are the high income countries in the present day?

Stephen Haber, will talk about his book manuscript in progress, Survival and Development (coauthored with Jordan Horrillo) that provides an answer to these questions based on fundamental principals of evolutionary ecology coupled to evidence generated from Geographic Information Systems and analyzed with techniques from machine learning.

Dinner will be provided to all attendees.

About the speaker

Stephen Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In addition, he is a professor of political science, professor of history, and professor of economics (by courtesy). Haber has spent his career investigating why the world distribution of income so uneven. His papers have been published in economics, history, political science, and law journals. He is the author of five books and the editor of six more. Haber’s most recent books include Fragile by Design with Charles Calomiris (Princeton University Press), which examines how governments and industry incumbents often craft banking regulatory policies in ways that stifle competition and increase systemic risk. The Battle Over Patents (Oxford University Press), a volume edited with Naomi Lamoreaux, documents the development of US-style patent systems and the political fights that have shaped them.