This book analyzes why we believe what we believe about politics, and how the answer affects the way democracy functions. It does so by applying social evolution theory to the relationship between the news media and politics, using the United States as its primary example. This includes a critical review and integration of the insights of a broad array of research, from evolutionary theory and political psychology to the political economy of media. The result is an empirically driven political theory on the media’s role in democracy: what role it currently plays, what role it should play, and how it can be reshaped to be more appropriate for its structural role in democracy.
In Why We Bite the Invisible Hand, Peter Foster delves into a conundrum: How can we at once live in a world of expanding technological wonders and unprecedented well-being, and yet hear a constant drumbeat of condemnation of the system that created it? That system, capitalism, which is based on private property and voluntary dealings, is guided by the "Invisible Hand," the metaphor for economic markets associated with the great Eighteenth Century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith. The hand guides people to serve others while pursuing their own interests, and produces a broader good that, as Smith put it, is "no part of their intention." Critics. however, claim that the hand is tainted by greed, leads to inequity and dangerous corporate power, and threatens not merely resource depletion but planetary disaster. Foster probes misunderstanding, fear and dislike of capitalism from the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution through to the murky concept of sustainable development. His journey takes him from Kirkcaldy, the town of Smith's birth, through Moscow McDonald's and Karl Marx's Manchester, on a trip to Cuba to smuggle dollars, and into the backrooms of the United Nations. His cast of characters includes the man who wrote the entry for "capitalism" in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, a family of Kirkcaldy butchers, radical individualist Ayn Rand, father of evolutionary theory Charles Darwin, numerous Nobel prizewinning economists, colonies of chimpanzees, and "philanthrocapitalist" Bill Gates. Foster suggests that the key to his conundrum lies in the field of evolutionary psychology, which offers to help us understand both why some of what Adam Smith called our complex "moral sentiments" may be outdated, and why so many of our economic assumptions tend to be wrong. We are hunter gatherers with iPhones. The Invisible Hand is counterintuitive to minds formed predominantly in small close-knit tribal communities where there were no extensive markets, no money, no technological advance and no economic growth. Equally important, we don't have to understand the rapidly evolving economic "natural order" to operate within it and enjoy its benefits any more than we need to understand our nervous or respiratory systems to stay alive. But that also makes us prone to support morally-appealing but counterproductive policies, such as minimum wage legislation. Foster notes that politicians and bureaucrats -- consciously or unconsciously -- exploit moral confusion and economic ignorance. Ideological obsession with market imperfections, income gaps, corporate power, resource exhaustion and the environment are useful justifications for those seeking political control of our lives. The book refutes claims that capitalism's validity depends on the system being "perfect" or economic actors "rational." It also notes the key difference between capitalism and capitalists, who are inclined to misunderstand the system as much as anyone. Foster points to the astonishing rise in recent decades of radical, unelected environmental non-governmental organizations, ENGOs. Closely related to that rise, Foster examines with one of the biggest and most contentious issues of our time: projected catastrophic man-made climate change. He notes that while this theory is cited as the greatest example in history of "market failure," it in fact demonstrates how both scientific analysis and economic policy can become perverted once something is framed as a "moral issue," and thus allegedly "beyond debate." Foster's book is not a paean to greed, selfishness or radical individualism. He stresses that the greatest joys in life come from family, friendship and participation in community, sport and the arts. What has long fascinated him is the relentless claim that capitalism taints or destroys these aspects of humanity rather than promoting them. Moreover, he concludes, when you bite the Invisible Hand... it always bites back.
This book could be called "The Intelligent Person's Guide to Economics." The title expresses Duncan Foley's belief that economics at its most abstract and interesting level is a speculative philosophical discourse, not a deductive or inductive science. Adam's fallacy is the attempt to separate the economic sphere of life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is led by the invisible hand of the market to a socially beneficial outcome, from the rest of social life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is morally problematic and has to be weighed against other ends.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND Made famous by the Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, the concept of an ‘invisible hand’ might be taken to imply that a government that governs least governs the best, from the viewpoint of society. Here an invisible hand appears to represent unfettered market forces. Drawing from this much-contested notion, Mittermaier indicates why such a view represents only one side of the story and distinguishes between what he calls pragmatic and dogmatic free marketeers. Published posthumously, with new contributions by Daniel Klein, Rod O’Donnell and Christopher Torr, this book outlines Mittermaier’s main thesis and his relevance for ongoing debates within economics, politics, sociology and philosophy.
One of the most astonishing features of social, economic, and political life is that large-scale patterns, structures, and behavioral regularities sometimes develop without anyone intentionally planning their occurrence, or without anyone deliberately working to bring them about. They evolve as a specific kind of unintended consequence of human action. They are the result of invisible hands. Building on Adam Smith's classic concept of "the invisible hand," this study presents a general approach, based on the theory of games and evolutionary theory, to explain such large-scale unintended consequences within markets, communities, and the state. This analysis by Nils Karlson is further used to explain the growth of the modern "welfare" state. It shows how an unconstrained democratic state through two distinct invisible-hand processes, the logic of conceit and the logic of opportunism, may develop into a "equilibrium" state, "The State of State." His work moves classic political economy into the world of political sociology. A normative contractual model is presented and the relative desirability of the state, markets, and communities is discussed. A major conclusion is that it is a choice between imperfect alternatives, involving decisions about more or less, rather than absolute judgments of an either/or variety. It is nevertheless suggested that society ought to be radically depoliticized and that constitutional constraints should be introduced in the universe of policy-making.
In building their profession around carefully selected interpretations of the work of Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall and others, mainstream economists have embraced such concepts as "the invisible hand," "equilibrium," "consumer rationality," "the marginal productivity theory," "the inevitability of diminishing returns," and the fiction of "pure competition." In contrast, "the evolutionary economics" of Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Ayres challenges all of these concept as unproven and capable of telling us little or nothing about the actual operation of the economy. Using the evolutionary framework, Human Progress Amid Resistance to Change argues that all cultures since prehistory have faced two opposing forces: technology, including human knowledge, and institutions rooted in ceremonialism. The former is dynamic, forward looking, accepting of change, cumulative (one discovery builds on another), and the major cause of human progress. The latter is static and consists of all customs, traditions, superstitions, rituals, ceremonies, taboos, and past binding religious beliefs that resist change. The book illustrates in detail how these competing forces have interacted throughout the history of the human race and how mainstream economics fails to grasp the significance of their combined effects.
An exploration of how approaches that draw on evolutionary theory and complexity science can advance our understanding of economics. Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years: one emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions; the other views economies as complex adaptive systems. In this book, leading scholars examine these two bodies of theory, exploring their possible impact on economics. Relevant concepts from evolutionary theory drawn on by the contributors include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a product of gene-culture coevolution. Applicable ideas from complexity theory include self-organization, fractals, chaos theory, sensitive dependence, basins of attraction, and path dependence. The contributors discuss a synthesis of complexity and evolutionary approaches and the challenges that emerge. Focusing on evolutionary behavioral economics, and the evolution of institutions, they offer practical applications and point to avenues for future research. Contributors Robert Axtell, Jenna Bednar, Eric D. Beinhocker, Adrian V. Bell, Terence C. Burnham, Julia Chelen, David Colander, Iain D. Couzin, Thomas E. Currie, Joshua M. Epstein, Daniel Fricke, Herbert Gintis, Paul W. Glimcher, John Gowdy, Thorsten Hens, Michael E. Hochberg, Alan Kirman, Robert Kurzban, Leonhard Lades, Stephen E. G. Lea, John E. Mayfield, Mariana Mazzucato, Kevin McCabe, John F. Padgett, Scott E. Page, Karthik Panchanathan, Peter J. Richerson, Peter Schuster, Georg Schwesinger, Rajiv Sethi, Enrico Spolaore, Sven Steinmo, Miriam Teschl, Peter Turchin, Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh, Sander E. van der Leeuw, Romain Wacziarg, John J. Wallis, David S. Wilson, Ulrich Witt
This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Nelson and Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms. To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium. The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.
