You will notice that the title of this book echoes both “The Origin of Species”by Charles Darwin, and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”.
The Subtitle is “EVOLUTION, COMPLEXITY, AND THE RADICAL REMAKING OF ECONOMICS”, and it published by Harvard Business School Press.
These are tremendously important – and so far, mostly ignored – issues in economics and the author, ERIC D. BEINHOFFER, is to be complimented for the energy and creativity with which he tackles them.
In approaching 500 pages of argument and information, I usually start by asking what it has to say about issues that I think are important in ‘remaking economics‘. High on my list are words like “Ecology” or “Gaia” because classical economics operates in total isolation from the natural – the Gaian – world.
None of those words appear in the index. Pity. It begins to look as if the Beinhoffer’s remaking of economics is not going to be as radical as it will need to be if it is to address the crucial issues of the 21st. Century.
Then in the opening pages, the author begins to try to fit the evolution of our complex, adaptive economic systems (so far, so good) within the Darwinian model of evolution, and there I think he makes a fundamental theoretical error.
Darwinian evolution is not a conscious process. Organisms do not pass on useful adaptations to their environment from one generation to the next. That was Lamarck’s theory of evolution and Darwin proved him wrong with his Theory of Natural Selection. With his theory, Darwin provided an almost complete explanation of how evolution works in the natural – the biological – world.
Now,it is true that in human societies, there is a constant and obvious process of social, economic, technological, scientific, intellectual evolution at work, but, in my view, that evolutionary process is not a biological process. Therefore it is not Darwinian: it is Lamarckian.
The fact that it is sort of spontaneous, seemingly unplanned (and I stress ’seemingly’), does not make the process Darwinian
Unlike complex, adaptive biological systems, our complex, adaptive human societies have the capacity to evolve by passing on from one generation to the next all kinds of conscious adaptations to their environments. And that is a quasi-Lamarckian process. Isn’t it?
That said, Beinhoffer’s work offers much to admire. I will return to some of his admirable insights in a later post.
For now, I would like to know if I have in any way missed something in Beinhoffer’s argument that makes the attempted Darwinian connection more valid.
