The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics

by Edited by Kurt Dopfer

• ISBN13: 9780521621991
• ISBN10: 0521621992
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-05-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

It is widely recognised that mainstream economics has failed to translate micro consistently into macro economics and to provide endogenous explanations for the continual changes in the economic system. Since the early 1980s, a growing number of economists have been trying to provide answers to these two key questions by applying an evolutionary approach. This new departure has yielded a rich literature with enormous variety, but the unifying principles connecting the various ideas and views presented are, as yet, not apparent. This volume brings together fifteen original articles from scholars - each of whom has made a significant contribution to the field - in their common effort to reconstruct economics as an evolutionary science. Using meso economics as an analytical entity to bridge micro and macro economics as well as static and dynamic realms, a unified economic theory emerges, offering an entirely new approach to the foundations of economics.

Table of Contents

Prolegomenon: 1. Evolutionary economics: a theoretical framework Kurt Dopfer

Part I. Ontological Foundations: 2. The rediscovery of value and the opening of economics Ilya Prigogine

3. Synergetics: from physics to economics Hermann Haken

4. Darwinism, altruism and economics Herbert A. Simon

5. Decomposition and growth: biological metaphors in economics from the 1880s to the 1980s Geoffrey M. Hodgson

6. Path dependence in economic processes: implications for policy analysis in dynamical systems contexts Paul A David

7. Is there a theory of economic history? Joel Mokyr

Part II. Framework for Evolutionary Analysis: 8. Toward an evolutionary theory of production Sidney G. Winter

9. Learning in evolutionary environments Giovanni Dosi, Luigi Marengo and Giorgio Fagiolo

10. Evolutionary theory of the firm Ulrich Witt

11. The self-organizational perspective on economic processes: a unifying paradigm John Foster

12. Evolutionary concepts in relation to evolutionary economics J. Stanley Metcalfe

13. Economics and the science of evolutionary complex systems Peter Allen

14. Perspectives on technological evolution Richard R. Nelson

15. Complex dynamics in economic organisms Ping Chen

16. Evolutionary theorizing on economic growth Gerald Silverberg and Bart Verspagen

Bibliography.