Assessing different historical pathways in the cultural evolution of economic development

A huge number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the substantial diversity in economic performance we see in the present-day. There has been a growing appreciation that historical and ecological factors have contributed to social and economic development. However, it is not clear whether such factors have exerted a direct effect on modern productivity, or whether they influence economies indirectly by shaping the cultural evolution of norms and institutions. Here we analyse a global cross-national dataset to test between hypotheses involving a number of different ecological, historical, and proximate social factors and a range of direct and indirect pathways. We show that the historical timing of agriculture predicts the timing of the emergence of statehood, which in turn affects economic development indirectly through its effect on institutions. Ecological factors appear to affect economic performance indirectly through their historical effects on the development of agriculture and by shaping patterns of European settler colonization. More effective institutional performance is also predicted by lower-levels of in-group bias which itself appears related to the proportion of a nation's population that descends from European countries. These results support the idea that cultural evolutionary processes have been important in shaping the social norms and institutions that enable large-scale cooperation and economic growth in present-day societies.