Imagine Economics as an Evolutionary Science
What might an evolutionary perspective mean for the future of economics?
The next evolution in economics is realising that scarcity based values (market values) are not appropriate mechanisms to use when dealing with anything that is potentially universally abundant – which is already a large set of things, and the set is exponentially expanding.
We need to understand the role of cooperative strategy sets in the evolution of complexity, rather than simply focusing on competition.
We need to evolve economics beyond markets.
We need to evolve to the next level of cooperation, universal cooperation.
Technology can empower universal security, but not inside a scarcity based model that promotes competition, but only in an abundance based model based on universal cooperation and fairness. You don’t need to dig too deeply into games theory to figure that out.
Evolution doesn’t have to work perfectly.
It only needs to find “heuristic hacks” (strategies that are a near enough fit to work in practice in the situations present most often) to work.
That seems to be what life is.
A set of many levels of cooperative systems (often involving layers of recursion), that succeed in replicating in practice in the environments they find themselves in.
We are capable of taking that up another level.
Economics, as currently understood by most, as a set of market derived systems, cannot do that.
Economics, as originally understood, as a set of systems for managing the largest household (originally a glorified village, and in today’s context this ball of rock currently containing some 7 billion people) is something more than most people currently imagine.
And science is not about consensus.
Science is about what does or does not work, in practice, in terms of explanatory paradigms and tools.
