The promises of a naturalistic approach: how cultural evolution theory can inform (evolutionary) economics (original) (raw)
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Evolutionary Economics: Theory and Evidence
Furth Prize Competition, 1989
The ecosystems of we are part of have been produced by evolutionary forces. These forces, which we have termed natural selection and genetic mutation operate on the genotypes of individuals and are expressed in their specie-characteristic phenotype's ability to adapt to environmental circumstances. The primary environmental characteristics are climate, terrain and food resources. The availability of food is a result of geoclimatic conditions and is then further subject to competition, both intra and interspecie. Success is deemed to have occurred if indivduals propagate another generation, and the macroscopic results are growth and decay of relative populations of the various species. Population growth is indicative of greater "fitness" for the environment of members of that species. The operating principles are localized for the individual, ie., local optimization of food acquisition, offspring and conservation of genetic endowment drive the end results subject to macro processes of geological and climatic changes over which the individuals have no control. Now economic systems bear superficial resemblance to biological ecosystems in that there is competition for scarce resources, growth/decay of employment by economic enterprises and growth/decline in per capita wealth of a social system. Thus, it has been suggested that the paradigm of biological evolution can provide insights into the dynamics of economic systems. Classical economists postulated the principle of maximization of individual benefit subject to climatic and natural resource endowments as the driving force of economic activity, a principle comparable to the biological model of natural selection. Taking this a bit further, genetic endowment would be analogous to technological capability as expressed by the cultural endowment of a society. Cultures mutate over time to adapt to new circumstances. Thus economics is the evolutionary equivalent of food acquisition and consumption in the non-human biosphere. Since, for many millenia, until the Neolithic revolution, human efforts were primarily directed at hunting and gathering, primitive economics is just that, the search, location, capture, distribution and consumption of food. The Neolithic revolution allowed the human species to replace the search, location and capture steps with production through the cultivation of selected plants and the domestication of animals for food, labor and materials. Distribution and consumption steps were still necessary. The communication, command and technology infrastucture needed for capturing or producing food is fundamentally the same for primitive and modern societies; they are the foundations for political and economic relationships. Modern societies are characterized by greater complexity, larger populations and larger production/distribution systems, but the issues are the same. The purpose of this paper is to provide a summarized, exact mathematical model for the dynamics of evolutionary economic systems. That model can be applied to the evidence that is plentiful. It represents a digest of work that has been developed over the last twelve years and incorporated into a number of papers presented at various conferences [Karasik, 1983. 1984, 1985, 1986]. We will also show how the social dynamics intertwine with the economic ones and define the processes of cultural growth and decay, once more bringing the human element into center stage. The basic starting point for this model are two fundamental principles. Starting from the out-growth of economics from biology (and thereby physics), we find that certain relationships are invariant. Invariant principles are known as conservation laws. Conservation of energy is the most famous of these laws. This law operates in the biological realm as well in the guise of the
The application of evolutionary concepts in evolutionary economics
2014
There are several ways to incorporate evolutionary concepts into economic thinking. This article reviews the most important transfers of this kind into evolutionary economics. It broadly differentiates between approaches that draw on an analogy construction to the biological sphere, those that make metaphorical use of Darwinian ideas, and avenues that are based on the fact that other forms of – cultural – evolution rest upon foundations laid before by natural selection. It is shown that an evolutionary approach within economics informed by insights from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and anthropology contributes to more realistic models of human behavior in economic
Evolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Economics
Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 1997
The paper identifies two major conceptual challenges facing evolutionary economics and shows how they parallel similar challenges facing evolutionary and developmental biology. One issue is the differentiation between learning-by-doing, on one hand, and habit formation, on the other. Another issue is the distinction between the cause or origin of evolutionary mutation/innovation, on one side, and the relevant unit which is the subject of evolutionary change, on the other. The failure to identify these two sets of distinction may hinder the articulation of an apropos evolutionary economic theory.
Prospects for an evolutionary economic psychology: Buying and consumption as a test case
2007
Until a few generations ago, humans made their living by foraging, like other animals. We have therefore inherited genes that allowed our ancestors to thrive as hunters and gatherers. Thriving in a modern economy requires very different behaviours but we cope because the human brain evolved to be flexible with the ability to form cooperative networks with other humans and to maintain the shared body of information, expertise and values which we call "culture". We argue that human economic behaviour is influenced by both the genes and the culture that we "inherit" and that both are a result of a Darwinian evolutionary process. An evolutionary approach is therefore likely to be of value in developing theories of economic behaviour. We then use this approach to analyse in broad terms how people that are born with the brains of foragers living in a small-scale society become consumers in a modern society and where this behaviour is likely to lead our species.
Why the Economic Conception of Human Behaviour Might Lack a Bio- logical Basis*
2016
ABSTRACT: In several recent papers Arthur Robson sketches evolutionary scenarios in order to explain why we humans evolved hard-wired utility functions and the capacity to choose flexibly on the basis of them. The-se scenarios are scrutinized minutely in the paper. It is pointed out that Robson ignores several relevant in-sightful ideas and distinctions that have surfaced in other contemporary evolutionary theorizing. A somew-hat different picture of human behavior emerges once these ideas and distinctions are taken seriously.
Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2011
Darwinism is shown possible to generalize fruitfully to help comprehend economic change by drawing on evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo") -its recent version, less concerned with replication of genes than with genomic instructing of development of organisms. The result is a conceptual model with multilevel applications, generalizing development as instructed self-organizing with inputs from environments, and evolution as experimental search for instructions making the development successful. Its economic interpretation suggests to unite several existing fields into evolutionary developmental economics, where economic change can be studied comprehensively as development instructed by actual institutional rules, intertwined with the evolution of these rules.
Economics as an Evolutionary Science
The Journal of Socio-Economics, 2004
Economists have long followed developments in the 'hard' sciences with an eye toward applying those developments to their own discipline. Hypothesis testing of positive statements, the use of mathematics as the formal language of economic theory, and the use of experiments are all examples of methods economists have borrowed from other disciplines. Economics as an Evolutionary Science is another attempt to improve the field of economics by borrowing the methodology of the natural sciences. Gandolfi, Gandolfi and Barash (GGB) try to incorporate what E.O. Wilson calls consilience (Wilson, 1998) into economics. Wilson argues that the natural sciences have advanced further than the social sciences because all the areas of the natural sciences overlap in a logically and empirically consistent manner. For example, chemists do not posit theories that violate the agreed upon laws of physics; instead chemists build upon those laws when extending their own field. This cross-relatedness and consistency has not been tried in the social sciences, argues Wilson, to the detriment of those who study it. GGB take up the gauntlet thrown down by Wilson, and attempt to link theory from the relatively hard science of biology to economics. In a bold and thought-provoking work, the authors try to make evolution the basis of economic analysis. Many economists have recognized the similarities between economic and evolutionary theory; in addition to making plain those similarities, this book moves further, and attempts to integrate evolution more fully into economics. The authors follow some lines of thought from both evolutionary theory and economic theory to their logical conclusions. Building on Stigler and Becker's (1977) idea that all consumers have the same utility function, the