Re: evolution and economics

In article
<5d57914e-8e5b-4605-a093-e4e57826a6a0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Burkhard <b.schafer@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 23 Jan, 22:51, bpuharic <w...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
with the collapse of the idea of the efficiency of the 'free market',
many economists are trying to integrate the ideas of evolutionary
biology into their subject (i avoid calling economics a 'science'):

http://www.newsweek.com/id/232111

 in Atlanta earlier this month, the annual meeting of the American
Economic Association was home to more soul-searching than number
crunching. Hundreds of the profession's most eminent thinkers turned
out to hear panel after panel discuss how, exactly, they'd gotten
things so wrong. Why did most of the world's top economists fail to
forecast the financial crisis? Should the teaching of economics in
universities be entirely rethought? While past stars at the AEA have
been conservative, finance--oriented intellectuals like Eugene Fama,
this year's meeting belonged to the liberal realists?Paul Krugman,
Robert Shiller, and the man of the hour, Nobel laureate Joseph
Stiglitz. Stiglitz delivered a keynote debunking the profession's key
tenet?namely, that markets can be trusted. Leading into the crisis,
Stiglitz said, "markets were not efficient and not self-correcting,
and now huge costs in the trillions of dollars are being borne by
every part of society."

At least since Reagan, the consensus was that you just had to make the
pie grow, and the best way to do that was to unshackle markets and
investors, and then get out of the way. Wealth, and thus health,
happiness, and all other good things, would eventually trickle down to
all.

Now that this view has been proved false, a whole slew of new theories
are competing to take its place. All are based, to one extent or
another, on the idea that people are irrational actors, and that
markets aren't always efficient.

And in many cases, the new theories blend economics with entirely
different disciplines. The adaptive-markets hypothesis, for instance,
proposes a new way of looking at the economy, and in particular the
financial markets: through the prism of evolutionary biology. The idea
is simple enough: adherents view the economy and financial markets as
an ecosystem, with different "species" (hedge funds, investment banks)
vying for "natural resources" (profits). These species adapt to one
another, but also go through periods of sudden mutations (read:
crises), which dramatically alter the makeup of the ecosystem. To
advocates of this theory, cell biology could hold the key to a new,
unifying theory of economics; policymakers like Larry Summers can
craft better policy, they suggest, by considering all market players
as parts of a living organism.

You means they are rediscovering Spencer?

Or evolutionary economics, anyway:

Boulding, Kenneth E. 1981. Evolutionary economics. Beverly Hills,
Calif.: Sage Publications.
Hamilton, David Boyce. 1991. Evolutionary economics: a study of change
in economic thought. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A.: Transaction
Publishers.
Hanappi, Hardy. 1994. Evolutionary economics: the evolutionary
revolution in the social sciences. Aldershot, England; Brookfield, Vt.,
USA: Avebury.
Leydesdorff, Loet, and Peter Van den Besselaar, eds. 1994. Evolutionary
economics and chaos theory: new directions in technology studies.
London: Pinter Publishers.
Magnusson, Lars, and Jan Ottosson, eds. 1997. Evolutionary economics
and path dependence. Cheltenham, UK; Brookfield, US: Edward Elgar.
Metcalfe, J. Stanley. 1998. Evolutionary economics and creative
destruction. London; New York: Routledge.
Weeks, John, and Charles Galunic. 2003. A Theory of the Cultural
Evolution of the Firm: The Intra-Organizational Ecology of Memes.
Organization Studies 24 (8):1309-1352.
Wilkins, John S. 2001. The appearance of Lamarckism in the evolution of
culture. In Darwinism and evolutionary economics, edited by J. Laurent
and J. Nightingale. Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar:160-183.

.

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