Kenneth Boulding’s AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding’s argument that economics could not be value-free should be distinguished from other well-known views of economics as a moral science, such as Gunn...

What is the function of our capacity for 'mental time travel'? Evolutionary considerations suggest that vivid memory and imaginative foresight may be crucial cognitive devices for human decision making. Our emotional engagement with past or future events gives them great motivational force, which may counter a natural tendency towards time discounting and impulsive, opportunistic behavior. In t...

My brand of evolutionary economics recognizes, highlights, that modern economies are always in the process of changing, never fully at rest, with much of the energy coming from innovation. This perspective obviously draws a lot from Schumpeter. Continuing innovation, and the creative destruction that innovation engenders, is driving the system. There are winners and losers in the process, but g...

During the last decades we have seen a revival of interest in the works of Joseph Schumpeter and “evolutionary” ideas in economics more generally. This paper presents an overview and interpretation of these developments. Following an introductory discussion of the concepts and ideas (and their origins) the main characteristics of Schumpeter’s own contribution are presented. On this basis we mak...

In the first part of the chapter, an outline of the evolutionary model of industrial dynamics is presented. The second part deals with a simulation study of the model focused on identification of necessary conditions for emergence of different industrial strictures. Textbooks of traditional economics distinguish four typical industry structures and study them under the names of pure competition...

RAC Institutional History of Economics

The presence of mutator genotypes in populations of bacteria may be favoured by selection because they produce rare beneficial mutations and thereby increase the rate of adaptive evolution. Recent work, however, shows that the relationship between mutation rates and adaptive evolution is more complicated.

Alice and Bob live in the forest. To sustain themselves, they collect fruits and berries and snare an occasional animal. The nights get cold, but Alice is a skillful fire-builder. Bob has never mastered this art. His fires fizzle and he never seems to collect the right kind of wood. Alice divides her time between collecting food and gathering wood. She does this in such a way that her marginal ...

This paper provides a short overview of dynamic models, denoted as adaptive or evolutive, recently adopted in economics and social sciences to describe systems with heterogeneous and boundedly rational agents. Some simple mathematical formalizations are shown, and a comparison between this kind of emerging literature and the orthodox main stream paradigm based on the assumption of fully rationa...