Evometrics: Quantitative evolutionary analysis from Schumpeter to Price and beyond

This paper argues that the development of a general statistical approach to quantitative evolutionary economics has for a long time been needed, that a limited form of this approach in to some extent already available in the practices of evolutionary economists, and that it is now possible to state it in a systematic form. The approach is called general evometrics, and it reached a relative stability through the work of George Price and his followers within evolutionary biology. The paper carefully describes this approach and derives Price’s equation for the partitioning of evolutionary change. The need for an economic evometrics is illustrated by the problems of Schumpeter in handling economic evolution in a quantitative way and by the surprising ease in specifying some of his theories in evometric terms. The tendency toward an independent development of an economic evometrics is illustrated by productivity studies and by Nelson and Winter’s work. These cases demonstrate that the developments within economics need to be supplemented with the generality and surprising fruitfulness of Price’s approach to evometrics. But the analysis of economic evolution has its own requirements, which includes a much more systematic analysis of the innovation effect than is necessary in biology.