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Author: Jean-Baptiste André
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031087909
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology –each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history – Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.
Author: Jean-Baptiste André
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031087909
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book
Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology –each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history – Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.
Author: Anna Sachko Gandolfi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351324632
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Economics is traditionally taken to be the social science concerned with the production, consumption, exchange, and distribution of wealth and commodities. Economists carefully track the comings and goings of the human household, whether written small (microeconomics) or large (macroeconomics) and attempt to predict future patterns under different situations. However, in constructing their models of economic behavior, economists often lose sight of the actual characteristics and motivations of their human subjects. In consequence, they have found the goal of an explanatory and predictive science to be elusive. Economics as an Evolutionary Science reorients economics toward a more direct appreciation of human nature, with an emphasis on what we have learned from recent advances in evolutionary science. The authors integrate economics and evolution to produce a social science that is rigorous, internally coherent, testable, and consistent with the natural sciences. The authors suggest an expanded definition of "fitness," as in Darwin's survival of the fittest, emphasizing not only the importance of reproduction and the quality of offspring, but also the unique ability of humans to provide material wealth to their children. The book offers a coherent explanation for the recent decline in fertility, which is shown to be consistent with the evolutionary goal of maximizing genetic success. In addition, the authors demonstrate the relevance to economics of several core concepts derived from biologists, including the genetics of parent-offspring conflict, inclusive fitness theory, and the phenomena of R-selection and K-selection. The keystone of their presentation is a cogent critique of the traditional concept of "utility." As the authors demonstrate, the concept can be modified to reflect the fundamental evolutionary principle whereby living things-including human beings-have been selected to behave in a manner that maximizes their genetic representation in future generations. Despite the extraordinary interest in applying evolutionary biology to other disciplines, Economics as an Evolutionary Science marks the first major attempt at a synthesis of biology and economics. Scholarly yet accessible, this volume offers unique and original perspectives on an entire discipline.
Author: Geoffrey Martin Hodgson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084234
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
How evolutionary ideas can be used to reconstruct economics.
Author: Armin W. Schulz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000067238
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
This book is the first systematic treatment of the philosophy of science underlying evolutionary economics. It does not advocate an evolutionary approach towards economics, but rather assesses the epistemic value of appealing to evolutionary biology in economics more generally. The author divides work in evolutionary economics into three distinct, albeit related, forms: a structural form, an evidential form, and a heuristic form. He then analyzes five examples of work in evolutionary economics falling under these three forms. For the structural form, he examines the parallelism between natural selection and economic decision making, and the parallelism between natural selection and market competition. For the evidential form, he looks at the relationship between animal and human economic decision making, and the evolutionary explanation of diversity in human economic decision making. Finally, for the heuristic form, he focuses on the plausibility of equilibrium modeling in evolutionary ecology and economics. In this way, he shows that linking evolutionary biology and economics can make for a powerful methodological tool that can enable progress in our understanding of various economics questions. Structure, Evidence, and Heuristic will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, evolutionary biology, and economics.
Author: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 178254836X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 695
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Book Description
ÔThis book is an ambitious intellectual enterprise to build a naturalistic foundation for economics, with amazingly vast knowledge of physical, biological, social sciences and philosophy. Readers will discover that approaches and insights emergent in institutional studies, (social)-neuroscience, network theory, ecological economics, bio-culture dualistic evolution, etc. are persuasively placed in a grand unified frame. It is written in a good Hayekian tradition. I recommend this book particularly to young readers who aspire to go beyond a narrowly specified discipline in the age of expanding communicability of knowledge and ideas.Õ Ð Masahiko Aoki, Stanford University, US ÔCarsten Herrmann-PillathÕs new book is an in-depth application of natural philosophy to economics that draws up an entirely new framework for economic analysis. It offers path-breaking insights on the interactions between human economic activity and nature and outlines a convincing solution to the long-standing reductionism controversy. A must-read for everyone interested in the philosophical underpinnings of economics as a science.Õ Ð Ulrich Witt, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena, Germany ÔÒBig pictureÓ philosophy of economics drifted into a dull cul-de-sac as it became obsessively focused on falsifiability and rationality. In this book Carsten Herrmann-Pilath pushes the field back onto the open highway by locating economics in the larger frameworks of metaphysics, evolutionary dynamics and information theory. This is large-scale, ambitious synthesis of ideas of the kind we expect from time to time to see devoted to physics and biology. Why should economics merit anything less? But of course this kind of intellectual tapestry must await the appearance of an unusually devoted scholar with special patience and eccentric independence from the pressure for quick returns that characterizes academic life. In the person of Hermann-Pilath this scholar has appeared. No one who wants to examine economics whole and in its richest context should miss his virtuoso performance in this book.Õ Ð Don Ross, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Georgia State University, US ÔHerrmann-PillathÕs work attempts to bring to bear upon the discipline of economics perspectives from other discourses which have been burgeoning recently Ð namely, thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, and semiotics, aiming at a consilience contextualized by economic activity and problems. This marks the work as a contemporary example of natural philosophy, which is now at the doorstep of a revival. The overall perspective is that human economic activity is an aspect of the ecology of the earthÕs surface, viewing it as an evolving physical system mediated through distributed mentality as expressed in technology evolution. Knowledge is taken to be ÔphysicalÕ with a performative function, as in PeirceÕs pragmaticism. Thus, the social meanings of expectations, prices, and credit are found to be rooted in energy flows. The work draws its foundation from Hegel and C.S. Peirce and its immediate guidance from Hayek, Veblen and Georescu-Roegen. The author generates an energetic theory of economic growth, guided by OdumÕs maximum power principle. Economic discourse itself is reworked in the final chapter, in light of the examinations of the previous chapters, naturalizing economics within an extremely powerful contemporary framework.Õ Ð Stanley N. Salthe, Binghamton University, US ÔAn Oscar-winning performance in the Òtheatre of consilience.Ó ItÕs hard to know which to praise first: Carsten Herrmann-PillathÕs humility or his ambition. He says his book Òis not a great intellectual featÓ because he pursues the Òhumble taskÓ of putting together Òthe ideas of others.Ó When he finally gets to economics he tries to Òbe as simple as possibleÓ and to conceive of economics in terms of the basics, at Òundergraduate level, so to say.Ó On the other hand, the scale of his ambition is to rethink the foundations of economics from first principles, while, at the same time, holding a running dialogue between contemporary sciences and classic philosophy. HeÕs much too modest, of course, because Foundations is a major achievement, but his modesty points to what makes it such a powerful treatise: the book is not about his preferences or prejudices; it is a Òscientific approach that aims at establishing truthful propositions about reality.Ó That is much harder to achieve than grand theories or Òcomplicated mathematics,Ó because it amounts to a new modern synthesis of the field Ð an achievement on a par with Julian HuxleyÕs, whose own modern synthesis of evolutionary theories in the 1940s allowed for the explosive growth of the biosciences over the next decades. The structure of the book is simple enough, providing a framework for the Ònaturalistic turnÓ in economics. Starting from material existence, causation and evolution, Herrmann-Pillath takes us through four fundamental concepts Ð individuals, networks, institutions and technology Ð before coming finally to the Òrealm of economics proper,Ó i.e. markets. However, Herrmann-Pillath believes that the Òfoundations of economics cannot be found within economicsÓ but only in dialogue with other sciences, or what he calls the Òtheatre of consilience.Ó ItÕs a theatre in which various characters come and go, where dialogue ebbs and flows, conflicts arise and are resolved, and where individual actions can be seen as concepts as, leading to higher levels of meaning as the plot unfolds. The magic of theatre, of course, is that the point of intelligibility, where the characters, actions and narrative resolve into meaningfulness, is projected out of the drama itself, into the spectator. ThatÕs you, dear reader. So it is with economics as a discipline. Economics is a player in a much larger performance about what constitutes knowledge, and how we know that. It is also a player in the economy it seeks to explain. To understand why money, firms, growth, prices, markets and other staples of economic thought emerge and function the way they do, it is necessary situate the analysis beyond economics (and the economy), and to engage with developments across the human, evolutionary and complexity sciences. This is what Herrmann-Pillath does, analyzing a breathtaking range of illuminating and sometimes challenging work along the way. We are treated to new ideas about the externalized brain, the evolution of knowledge in the Earth System (i.e. not just among humans), the role of signs and performativity in these processes, as well as that of Òenergetic transformations.Ó But Herrmann-Pillath is not satisfied with the ÒmodestÓ task of bringing the best of modern scientific thought to bear on economic concepts and performances; he really does harbor a deeper purpose. The clue is in his apparently quixotic desire to hang on to philosophical insights associated with pre-evolutionary thinkers like Aristotle and Hegel, and his apparently eccentric desire to place the semiotic philosophy of C.S. Pierce at center stage. But the patient observer will see that he is not seeking to change the facts by imposing idealist notions on them after the event. Instead, he is arguing for a change in the way we perform ourselves in the face of these facts. He is looking for a modern-day equivalent of Confucius or Socrates: one who can imagine values and beliefs that Òdefine the human species in a new way.Ó For those who have eyes to see, as the drama unfolds, it may be that we have found such a figure in Carsten Herrmann-Pillath himself, modesty, ambition and all. This is ÒCultural ScienceÓ as it should be done.Õ Ð John Hartley, Curtin University, Australia and Cardiff University, UK
Author: Peter Koslowski
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3662038250
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
The theory of evolution and Neo-Darwinian biological theory extend their analysis in sociobiology from the life sciences and the animal societies to human societies. Sociobiology as a unifying theory of the social interaction within and between species has led to an integration of economic analysis into biology. The economy of nature has become the subject of bioeconomics which in turn transferred biological analysis to the human economy. Evolution, competition, selection, and cooperation are phenomena common to the economy of nature and human economy. The inclusion of economic and cultural theory in evolution theory raises the question whether the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis with its exclusive concern with somatic heredity is able to incorporate developmental systems of the human economy and of cultural heredity. A new synthesis of the natural and the social sciences is in the making.
Author: (Pier) Paolo Saviotti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351127691
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Recently, evolutionary theories of economic and technological change have attracted a considerable amount of attention which reflects the problems encountered by mainstream analysis of dynamic phenomena and quantitative change. This book, originally published in 1991, develops the debate and draws on the concepts of evolutionary biology, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, systems and organization theory. While recognizing that new technology is not the cause of quantitative change, the editors claim it should play a more central role in economic theory and policy. At the same time, the ground is laid for a more generalized concept of innovation and experimentation and their relation to routine activities. The book is intended for economists.
Author: Terence C. Burnham
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 0965856429
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
Ever since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, genetic evolutionary theory has increasingly served as the foundation for fields that deal with organisms that arose by natural selection. This thesis argues that economic theory should integrate with Darwinian theory through the creation of a "genetic evolutionary economics". The promise of genetic evolutionary economics is a better understanding of human nature and, consequently, a more accurate and comprehensive economic science. Economic theory rests on a set of assumptions about human nature. These economic axioms concern human genes, but there is no explicit connection between genetic evolution and economic theory. As a result, human behavior and economic predictions of that behavior diverge in a variety of important settings. Why, for example, do most people save too little for the future when economics assumes that they will save enough? Chapter 2 discusses the difficulties inherent in the standard economic approach. Natural selection theory, the chapter argues, is the best tool for refining the axioms of economics. Genetic evolutionary economics allows the derivation of parameters that are intractable with standard economic techniques. There is, for instance, an ancient debate within economics about the role of self-interest in human affairs. Chapter 3 builds a genetic evolutionary model relevant to this issue, and concludes that a Darwinian lens removes many of the apparent paradoxes. Genetic evolutionary economics is a scientific endeavor. As such, it produces specific, testable hypotheses concerning behavior in economically relevant situations. Chapter 4 reports on a theoretical and experimental investigation of gift giving. A genetic evolutionary model organizes the existing data on gift giving and makes novel, testable predictions. Laboratory experiments, performed to test the theory, confirm the evolutionary model's predictions.
Author: Kenneth Ewart Boulding
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
A new model of economic life that looks at it in terms of ecological interaction and mutation is presented in Evolutionary Economics. It looks at commodities, for example, as if they were a species in the social ecosystem. Boulding describes his new model with clarity and wit, showing its roots in classical economics and exploring the prospects of an evolutionary approach for bettering human conditions.
Author: Geerat Vermeij
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826497
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth unites three bodies of thought--economics, evolution, and history--that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics, and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems--competition, cooperation, adaptation, and feedback--govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle. Using a wealth of examples of evolutionary innovations, Vermeij argues that evolution and economics are one. Powerful consumers and producers exercise disproportionate controls on the characteristics, activities, and distribution of all life forms. Competition-driven demand by consumers, when coupled with supply-side conditions permitting economic growth, leads to adaptation and escalation among organisms. Although disruptions in production halt or reverse these processes temporarily, they amplify escalation in the long run to produce trends in all economic systems toward greater power, higher production rates, and a wider reach for economic systems and their strongest members. Despite our unprecedented power to shape our surroundings, we humans are subject to all the economic principles and historical trends that emerged at life's origin more than 3 billion years ago. Engagingly written, brilliantly argued, and sweeping in scope, Nature: An Economic History shows that the human institutions most likely to preserve opportunity and adaptability are, after all, built like successful living things.
