I recently discovered a new discipline of economics that I didn't know existed: evolutionary economics. In a nutshell, it tries to understand the economy by drawing parallels with evolutionary theory from biology.
I came across evolutionary economics by accident through an assignment for our microeconomics class. We were asked to find two papers describing non-traditional theories of the firm and compare them. To make the exercise interesting, I tried to find the wildest theory I could find, which led me to The Firm as an Interactor: Firms as Vehicles for Habits and Routines. It's a 2004 paper published by two European economists, Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen, in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. Yes, there is such a journal (actually, it's the 98th-ranked economics journal, according to Journal-Ranking.com).
Basically, the paper argues that the purpose of firms is aligned with evolutionary biology theory. Essentially, the routines and practices firms employ are like traits, and the firms are like organisms that pass those traits on through a survival-of-the-fittest kind of mentality. Firms with inefficient practices get weeded out over time, just as humans with "weaker" traits get weeded out through evolution. The paper is an interesting interpretation of why we see technological progress.
I find it strange that I've been studying economics for more than five years and have never heard of an entire discipline. But I guess learning something new is what makes studying exciting.
Tuesday, December 15
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It's hard to fit this into the undergrad curriculum, at the moment. Once the discipline has digested it a bit more, and we see if the current interest expands, you will see it in undergrad courses. I'm not a big believer myself.
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting area of economics. I have read very little, but my impression is that it seems intuitively correct, but probably tries to hard to make the analogy work.
ReplyDeleteOf course, that's quite possibly my bias, stemming from the bastardization of the concept of evolution in popular society. I am open to giving evolutionary economics a chance (when I have some time to do more reading on it).