Lee Lecture 2017: The Ecological Origins of Economic and Political Systems

Why are some world regions populated by wealthy democracies, while others are populated by low and middle-income autocracies? This paper argues that the answer is to be found in the ecological constraints operating on food kilocalorie production, storage, and trade between the Colombian exchange and the onset of modernity (roughly 1500 to 1750). Those differences in what could be grown, how long it could be stored, and how much of it had to be set aside as a buffer against weather shocks structured the incentives of human beings, giving rise to different institutional ecologies, only one of which was conducive to sustained economic growth and the consolidation of democracy. In order to test this theory we have constructed a geo-coded dataset that approximates the size, productivity, storage capacity, and drought frequency of agricultural markets circa 1750. We find that those variables not only explain 20 to 50 percent of the variance in levels of democracy and per capita incomes today, but also explain the variance in the emergent phenomena (levels of urbanization, human capital, and limits on government authority as measured in the 19th century) that mediated between agricultural ecologies in the past and human well-being today.