If economics is the problem, is evolution the solution?

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  • Social brain

“You can’t ask a good “how” question if you’re not asking the right “why” question." - David Sloan Wilson et al.

I want to start by saying the discipline of economics is in crisis. I want to say that its core models make indefensibly unrealistic assumptions about human nature, that its fixation with mathematical modelling and disregard for the real world is causing significant harm to three dimensional people, and its failure to foresee the financial crisis should have been the nail in the coffin for a discipline that is often characterised, not entirely unfairly, as an ideology masquerading as a science.

I want to say all these things but hesitate to do some emphatically, because what's the alternative? Writers like Steve Keen and Ha Joon Chang(and many, many more) or organisations like the New Economics Foundation (and many more) are often extremely convincing about the limitations of existing economic models, but typically much less convincing about fully thought out alternatives. Sometimes that lack of conviction relates to a lack of practical tests of ideas, or the complexity of simulating the economy as a whole, but often it is due to a lack of persuasive theoretical grounding.

One possibility for a new theoretical grounding for economics came to my attention several months ago when the RSA were approached by The Evolution Institute. I remember their President, Professor David Sloan Wilson, opening the conversation with myself and our CEO Matthew Taylor by saying something like: "So, we're experts in evolution interested in public policy and you're experts in public policy interested in evolution...so we wanted to explore how we might work together." It was an engaging and congenial meeting, as a result of which we are mentioned as a partner on their website, and I am one of their many informal advisors who enjoys perusing their updates. To be honest though, The Evolution Institute has been off my radar for a while, mostly because we didn't see any tangible next moves.

Evolution bounced back to salience when I read the following piece "A Good Social Darwinism" in Aeon Magazine, which is a good and informative read in itself, but seems to have been written mostly to promote a recent edition of The Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, which is summarised here where you can also download all the articles. In the Aeon piece the core issue is framed as follows:

"The current economic paradigm owes its dominance in part to its prestige as a formal mathematical theory. Everything else in economics seems like a mish-mash of ideas by comparison. The strongest challenge to the dominant model comes from behavioural economists, who call for economic theory and policy based on H. sapiens, not H. economicus. But, so far, behavioural economists have merely compiled a list of ‘anomalies’ and ‘paradoxes’ that are anomalous and paradoxical only against the background of the general equilibrium model, like satellites that cannot escape the orbit of their mother planet. They have not put forth a general theory of their own."

If the aim to create a new paradigm in thinking about economics and public policy through evolution does not sound immediately compelling, perhaps that's mostly because we have lots of assumptions about evolution and the uses of evolution that may not be valid or useful. The general tone of The Evolution Institute is considered, discerning, open and scholarly rather than ideological or hubristic, and while there is a slight elision between applications to public policy in general and economics in particular, in most cases the two are so closely related so it doesn't matter. They are not particularly hostile to religion, and they are keen to highlight that evolution emphasises our cooperative nature as much if not more than competition, as is often assumed.

I haven't read every article in the new journal, but from what I have considered I want to commend the work very strongly. They have clearly made a great deal of progress:

First, they have clarified the existing problems relating to economic thought as it stands, including a clear critique of Walrasian equilibrium theory (see the Aeon piece, paragraphs 3-6 for an overview) from an evolutionary perspective:

"As an instructive example, the Walrasian core of neoclassical economics is based on the assumption that individuals maximize their absolute utilities. Natural selection favors traits that maximize relative fitness, which cause individuals to survive and reproduce better than others, not in any absolute sense. The choice of assumptions is not arbitrary; if people are motivated to increase their relative welfare rather than their absolute welfare,then this must be reflected in economic theory and policy. Walras and his contemporaries had no way of knowing that one of their foundational assumptions was at odds with evolutionary theory. Subsequent economists operating within the neoclassical paradigm could have questioned one of their foundational assumptions on their own, but for the most part they didn’t. Only recently have economists such as Frank (2011)begun to challenge the assumption of absolute utility maximization at a foundational level by employing an explicitly evolutionary perspective."

Second, They have unpacked what they mean by 'evolutionary perspective' by linking it to the work of  Niko Tinbergen, who suggests that an evolutionary approach is a kind of tool kit comprising four questions we should ask of any given phenomena/behaviour/tendency: what is the function of a trait, what is the evolutionary history of a trait, what is the mechanism of the trait and how did the trait develop?  (see pages 54-56 of the leading article in the journal). I was quite struck by how this approach appears to generate explanatory power.

Third: They have acknowledged and addressed four of the main counter-arguments (p54) that question the value of the evolutionary approach. At the slight risk of oversimplifying, their counter to these arguments boils down to:  “You can’t ask a good “how” question if you’re not asking the right “why” question. And you can’t ask the right “why” question without seriously consulting evolutionary theory.” (P58)

What’s good for me is not necessarily good for my family. What’s good for my family is not necessarily good for my clan. What’s good for my clan is not necessarily good for my nation. What’s good for my nation is not necessarily good for the global environment or economy."

Fourth: They have started looking at particular case studies, addressing topics that have always been at the heart of economics and public policy, such as the efficacy of groups, the nature of institutions, self-organization, trust, discounting the future, and risk tolerance. Their claim is that economics is caught in a tug-of-war between two ideas: the idea that we need market processes to proceed unhindered and the idea that a healthy economy requires regulation (i.e. Is Keynes v Hayek ad infinitum really the best we can do?). They believe evolution is needed to escape this impasse.

Two main points shine out here. 1) The debate changes when your models are grounded in people pursuing relative utility with respect to their social reference points (as the evolutionary perspective would indicate) rather than absolute utility (which standard economic models tend to wrongly assume as the norm). 2) The debate changes when you factor in layered interests. I really liked the following expression of this idea:

"The traits that maximise the advantage of an individual, relative to the members of its group, are typically different from the traits required for the group to function as a coordinated unit to achieve shared goals. What’s good for me is not necessarily good for my family. What’s good for my family is not necessarily good for my clan. What’s good for my clan is not necessarily good for my nation. What’s good for my nation is not necessarily good for the global environment or economy."

There is much here that I like and that intrigues me, but also much that still felt too abstract or less than fully persuasive. For instance (from the Aeon piece) "The disciplines that comprise the biological sciences are even more diverse than those comprising the human-related sciences, but they are much better integrated, thanks to the common theoretical framework provided by evolutionary theory.There is nothing preventing the human-related disciplines from becoming integrated in the same way." 

Really? Biology is to evolution as psychology or sociology or economics or anthropology or politics or social policy is to....evolution? That doesn't sound right to me at all. Perhaps I am missing something, but it feels like there is a category error here. The common theoretical framework mentioned stems from a shared ontology in the biological realm that typically won't apply in the social, cultural, economic, semiotic, psychological realms. Sure, in all cases evolved humans are central, but there are emergent properties from human behaviour and interaction in each case that do not connect to each other, or to evolution, in the same way.

However! The good news is that having read some of their recent outputs, when I raise that kind of doubt, I am almost certain they will already have considered it seriously and have the beginnings of an answer ready. More generally my impression is that this while there is still cause for scepticism and caution, this perspective is now sufficiently well developed to be worth taking very seriously indeed.

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  • Like a lot of academic chunter, it fails to hit the mark. Those of us who are trying to create new businesses in the e-world come up against the total failure of academic models to reflect reality or to provide useful input to it. As a friend, a leading Management Scientist and deputy head of a university business school said to me recently,

    "John, the problem is that you just throw mud at the wall to se what sticks. There are no Management Science models for this. Angry Birds is a billion-seller, but there is no apparent reason for this. If I were ten years younger I'd try and work out new theories. But, as it stands, I'm just going to retire early as you lot have broken everything and Management Science has nothing useful to say to you."

    FWIW, I see our age as The Age of Electricity. Interestingly, Natural Science has three different models of how electricity works. All incompatible. The Electronic Engineer just picks one to see what happens. A close friend, a just-retired senior BT Engineer told me that it is impossible, theoretically, to send phone calls down telephone lines: there simply isn't enough electricity to do it. But, by pushing on boundaries we can now do 4Mb broadband - 1,000x times beyond the theoretical limit.

    Or, think of canals and trains. Which one was highly profitable, and which one was not? Answer: people like the Earl of Stafford made a fortune on the Manchester Ship Canal. But 40% of funded railways in the UK weren't even built. And nobody has ever made money from railways. They still run as a public subsidy today.

    Explain that theoretically in such a way as to become predictive.

    Economic theory is retrospective. it makes sense only as a rear view mirror. We have all seen Keynesianism and Monetarism rise and fall. We seem to be in The Age of Economic Guesswork.

    I would suggest that turning to Evolution - which isn't a theory, but a Grand Narrative - won't help. After all, under the banner 'evolution' hides a host of incompatible theories, not least the clash between Selfish Gene Darwinism (currently in decline) and Social Darwinism (current in ascendancy.)

    Back to my first topic: if Economics has anything to say to Entrepreneurship in the emergent electronic industries it seems to be: its a Lottery!

  • I think what you may be missing about evolution as a unifying framework for the social sciences is the idea of cultural change as Darwinian. When people think about evolution, they are often only thinking about biological evolution, but there is now widespread adoption of evolution in a broader sense involving any sort of agents competing for success, whether people or corporations.

  • Thanks for the comment. The perspective may not be new, but I do think it is relatively well developed compared to the other sources you mention. And as I mention, the Aeon article is a kind of advert for the much more detailed perspective that is developed in the journal articles.

    The comparison of evolution with physics is worth making, but in that battle, the tools of evolutionary theory seem much better suited to the task.

    And there is no unified field theory on offer here as far as I can tell. It's more like a way to get traction, and the latest word on that.

  • It would be a mistake to view this approach as some kind of "Holy Grail" -- or even something that is terribly new. And the description of the state of economics in the article appears to be lifted wholesale from Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics". See also Beinhocker's " The Origin of Wealth" for a good summary of how biological theories have been applied.

    Yet in the end, trying to clumsily graft biological theories onto a complex and dynamic problem of human behavior is no better than Walras and Marshall's attempts to apply physics to the same thing.

    The better and more guarded approach might be found in the ideas of Charlie Munger, which is simply to know the big ideas behind the natural and social sciences and analyze situations as if they were problems in physics, biology, psychology, anthropology, etc. to see if you come up with the same answers under each form of analysis. Maybe not very satisfying for those who want pat answers I know.

    Otherwise aren't we just scratching at attempts of formulating a "unified field theory" of everything that is rooted more in belief than science? As John Gray points out, quasi-religions come in many disguises. If the theory provides that we are evolving in some teleological way towards some superior state (as opposed to simply adapting to random changes in the environment), that's what you'll end up with -- as is the current state of economics in many quarters. See also Nelson's "Economics as Religion."

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