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.