Evolutionary Economics

This conceptual theoretical article aims to present a framework to analyze aspects related to the change of organizational routines from the perspective of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary Theory was chosen because it presented an alternative to Contingency Theory and Ecology of Organizational Populations because their assumptions do not defend the contingent determinism, or the inertia of the population respectively. As a result, we assume that the routines in the Evolutionary Theory of organizations can be classified into: isomorphic, or emerging. Furthermore, We advocate organizations as living beings try to move away from the initial forms seeking greater ability to survive.

In this paper, we explore the evolution of a corporate system by analyzing the case of production and employment structures in the Toyota Group. Our findings show that the production structure of the Toyota Group, which has been gradually affected by external factors, market factors, and institutional factors since 1980s, had fully transformed from the domestic-oriented production structure to the overseas-oriented production structure in 2009. And we have also determined that the domestic employment structure of Toyota Motor Corporation has evolved to allow the flexible management of worker supply and demand through the hiring of non-regular workers, in response to the amendment of the Worker Dispatching Act since 2004. Consequently the Toyota Group’s production and employment structures evolve to help to secure channels that help the Toyota Group flexibly adjust its output in response to abrupt economic fluctuations.

Standard economic textbooks usually start with the assumptions that there exists • a set of representative consumers with exogenously given, fixed preference structures, • a set of representative production units with exogenously given, fixed production functions, • a set of identical market mechanisms determining a vector of endogenous prices enabling coordination of optimisation of the former two types of representative agents. Economic history shows that the last two hundred years of evolution in most advanced was mainly characterized by • an incredible change of dimensions and quantities of goods and services keeping preference structures in permanent flux, • an enormous amount of entry, exit and modification of production units and their corresponding production processes, • market mechanisms are constantly diversifying; the actual, observed price vector being the result of a multitude of market institutions that represent locally and temporarily frozen political and economic f...

We present an empirical modelling approach of agents’
expectations based on symbolic regression (SR)

1. Via genetic programming (GP) we derive two data-driven
indicators from survey-based expectations

2. We assess the performance of both indicators in fourteen
European countries

3. By means of constrained optimization we find the optimal
weights of both indicators to construct a composite index

4. We evaluate the ability of the generated estimates of
economic growth to track the evolution of GDP

This work aims to shedding light on the nature and causes of severe unemployment in the Spanish region of Andalusia—34 per cent of the active population, three times the EU average. Far from explanations based on neoclassical economics or external to the region or simply truisms, I sought the ultimate determinants of a high and persistent unemployment permanently above the Spanish average.
The origins of modern Andalusia go back to the Early Modern Age when most Iberian countries amalgamated into a single entity. However, unlike its northern counterparts Andalusia’s predecessor al-Andalus was a Muslim country and its incorporation into the Western European world was implemented through forced assimilation.
Five centuries after the conquest, the transposition of northern institutions in the south has resulted in a backward region with age-old problems of economic development and unemployment. I brought together elements such as violence, landownership, trust, and the role of the state from the point of view of evolutionary economics.

[27th Annual Conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE). “A New Role for the Financial System”, 17-19 September 2015, Genova]

Esta es la presentación de apoyo que usé para mi exposición sobre el análisis de las necesidades de consumo vistas desde la psicología humanista de Abraham Maslow en contraste con la visión de la "economía descalza" propuesta por el economista Manfred Max-Neef / this is the support that I used for my presentation about the analysis of consumption needs of views from Abraham Maslow's humanistic psychology in contrast to "barefoot economy" proposed by economist Manfred Max- Neef

China’s Creative Industries explores the role of new technologies, globalization and higher levels of connectivity in re-defining relationships between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ in 21st century China. The evolution of new business models, the impact of state regulation, the rise of entrepreneurial consumers and the role of intellectual property rights are traced through China’s film, music and fashion industries. The book argues that social network markets, consumer entrepreneurship and business model evolution are driving forces in the production and commercialization of cultural commodities. In doing so it raises important questions about copyright’s role in the business of culture, particularly in a digital age.

By looking at collective intelligence (CI) through four distinct lenses, this paper draws on recent research in organizational design, evolutionary economics, cognitive sciences, knowledge ecology and political economy to built a twin path forward: collective intelligence and collective leadership. It lays out elements of a framework for building this twin path beyond chaos. It is our intent to invite conversations designed to engage questions surrounding this interdependent evolutionary path. How might we develop criteria for a design capable of supporting a large range of collective intelligence phenomena in an integrated way? Will the emergent socio-economic life forms be strong enough to balance the destructive power of our global crises if and when "the perfect storm" hits? When everything goes worse and worse, and better and better, at the same time, and they do it faster and faster, how do we deal with the ensuing chaos? In order to bring forth desirable futures, we...

We propose an evolutionary perspective on the geography of network formation that is grounded in a dynamic proximity framework. In doing so, we root the proximity concept in an evolutionary approach to the geography of innovation networks. We discuss three topics. The first topic focuses on explaining the structure of networks. The second topic concentrates on explaining the effects of

"Whether path dependence 'exists' or not remains an unresolved question - but it is also a misformulated one. The paper demonstrates that the key issue is methodological, not ontological, and that management and organization scholars have been using inadequate research designs in the past to capture path dependence. The paper draws on recent research to explain why the QWERTY case does not provide evidence for path dependence, and provides clear methodological guidelines regarding which methods should be used in the future to fruitfully explore path dependence in the social sciences. Overall, the paper offers an alternative to both the 'sceptics' who claim that path dependence is a myth and the 'believers' who highlight the huge implications of path dependence, but fail to provide convincing evidence that it actually exists as a distinctive process leading to lock-in.

This paper reviews recent economic theorising on innovation from the angle of analysing social innovations (SI). It is structured as follows: Some of the basic notions used in innovation analyses are considered in section 2, focusing on the subject, objectives and levels of change. Section 3 reviews how innovation is understood in particular models of innovation and analysed by various schools of economics highlighting the types of actors and knowledge perceived as relevant in these various approaches. The notion of innovation systems (national, regional, sectoral, and technological ones) and its analytical and policy relevance is explored in section 4. Lessons relevant for analysing social innovation are drawn at the end of each sub-section, and the most important of those are reiterated in the concluding section.

Evolution of technology is a stepwise advancement of a complex system of artifact, driven by interaction with subsystems and other systems, considering technical choices, technical requirements and science advances, which generate new and/or improved products or processes for use or consumption to satisfy increasing needs and/or to solve complex problems of people in society. This study explains evolution of technology with two different approaches: theories based on processes of competitive substitution of a new technology for the old one and theories considering a multi-mode interaction between technologies, such as the theory of technological parasitism. These theories described here can encourage further theoretical and empirical exploration in the terra incognita of the evolution of technology to explain economic and social change in human society.

I propose an objective definition of money through a biological definition of cooperation, as opposed to altruism. I argue that these types of sociality are confused because they are not evaluated from a situated perspective of animal interactions. The theory of reciprocal altruism does not correctly model the human exchange of goods and services. These constructive economic interactions require the ability to choose partners based on individual preferences. On the other hand, altruism presupposes partnership under a common standard of value. Therefore, the nature and evolution of money cannot be explained by conceptualising it as a token of altruism or as a form of credit. Rather, money is a transferable signal that enables cooperative interactions between distant or unrelated individuals. This behavioural definition similarly proposes an understanding of morality and human society as strategies of indirect reciprocity in the context of game theory.

1. Einleitung .............................................................................................2
1.1 Managementlehre ....................................................................3
1.2 System-Methodik ............................................................................3
1.3 Komplexe Systeme ....................................................................4
1.4 Zwei Theorietypen .....................................................................5
1.4.1 konstruktivistisch-technomorpher Theorietyp ....................5
1.4.2 Systemisch-evolutionärer Theorietyp .....................................6
1.5 Aufbau des Buchs .....................................................................8
2. Das Modell lebensfähiger Systeme von Stafford Beer ............8
2.1 Die Gesamtstruktur des lebensfähigen Systems. ....................9
2.2 Das Prinzip der Rekursion ..........................................................11
2.3 Das Prinzip der Lebensfähigkeit ..........................................13
2.3.1 Komplexitätsbeherrschung ..................................................15
2.3.2 Das Gesetz der erforderlichen Varietät ..................................17
2.3.3 Das Bremerman’sche Limit ..................................................18
2.3.4 Das Prinzip der Ordnung ...........................................................19
3. Das Problem der Komplexität ...................................................23
3.1 Die allgemeinen Evolutionstheorie ...........................................24
3.2  Die Lenkung des Problemlösungsprozesses ...........................28
3.3 Varietätsbewältigung ....................................................................31
3.4 Grundprinzipien kognitiver Prozesse ....................................32
3.5 Prozessmerkmale des evolutionären Problemlösens ............34
4. Umgang mit Komplexität ............................................................38
4.1 Spiralenförmiges Vorgehen ....................................................40
4.2 Evolutionärer Problemlösungsprozeß ....................................40
4.3 Das Rückkoppelungsprinzip ....................................................41
4.4 Das Prinzip der Homöostase ....................................................43
5. Metasystemische Steuerung ....................................................44
6. Strategien zur Komplexitätsbewältigung ....................................48
7. Zusammenfassung ....................................................................56

This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and edited them to bring them up to date (2017). The copyright page has the date of the edition and new editions will be noted there as I edit old articles or add new ones. All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds  within the framework of our innate psychology as presented in the table of intentionality.  As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important way, we are apes.  If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., of human ecology and psychology to actually give them some control over themselves), maybe civilization would have a chance.  As things are however the leaders of society have no more grasp of things than their constituents and so collapse into anarchy is inevitable.

The first group of articles attempt to give some insight into how we behave that is reasonably free of theoretical delusions. In the next three groups I comment on three of the principal delusions preventing a sustainable world— technology, religion and politics (cooperative groups). Certainly each has much of value, but as currently implemented, they are all band aids on the cancer of selfishness and stupidity, and as handmaidens of selfish genetics lead straight to Hell on Earth.

It is critical to understand why we behave as we do and so the first section presents articles that try to describe (not explain as Wittgenstein insisted) behavior.  I start with a brief review of the logical structure of rationality, which provides some heuristics for the description of language (mind, rationality, personality) and gives some suggestions as to how this relates to the evolution of social behavior.  This centers around the two writers I have found the most important in this regard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, whose ideas I combine and extend within the dual system (two systems of thought) framework that has proven so useful in recent thinking and reasoning research. As I note, there is in my view essentially complete overlap between philosophy, in the strict sense of the enduring questions that concern the academic discipline, and the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (behavior). Once one has grasped Wittgenstein’s insight that there is only the issue of how the language game is to be played, one determines the Conditions of Satisfaction (what makes a statement true or satisfied etc.) and that is the end of the discussion.

The key to everything about us is biology, and it is obliviousness to it that leads millions of smart educated people like Obama, Chomsky, Clinton and the Pope to espouse suicidal utopian ideals that inexorably lead straight to Hell On Earth.  As W noted, it is what is always before our eyes that is the hardest to see.  We live in the world of conscious deliberative linguistic System 2, but it is unconscious, automatic reflexive System 1 that rules. This is the source of the universal blindness described by Searle’s The Phenomenological Illusion (TPI), Pinker’s Blank Slate and Tooby and Cosmides’ Standard Social Science Model.

The next section describes the digital delusions, which confuse the language games of System 2 with the automatisms of System one, and so cannot distinguish biological machines (i.e., people) from other kinds of machines (i.e., computers).  The ‘reductionist’ claim is that one can ‘explain’ behavior at a ‘lower’ level, but what actually happens is that one does not explain human behavior but a ‘stand in’ for it.  Hence the title of Searle’s classic review of Dennett’s book (“Consciousness Explained”)— “Consciousness Explained Away”.  In most contexts ‘reduction’ of higher level emergent behavior to brain functions, biochemistry, or physics is incoherent. Even for ‘reduction’ of chemistry or physics, the path is blocked by chaos and uncertainty.  Anything can be ‘represented’ by equations, but when they ‘represent’ higher order behavior, it is not clear (and cannot be made clear) what the ‘results’ mean.  Reductionist metaphysics is a joke, but most scientists and philosophers lack the appropriate sense of humor.

Other digital delusions are that we will be saved from the pure evil (selfishness) of System 1 by computers/AI/robotics/ nanotech/genetic engineering created by System 2.  The No Free Lunch principal tells us there will be serious and possibly fatal consequences.  The adventurous may regard this principle as a higher order emergent expression of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Hi-tech enthusiasts hugely underestimate the problems resulting from unrestrained motherhood, and of course it is neither profitable nor politically correct (and now with third world supremacism dominant, not even possible) to be honest about it.

The last section describes The One Big Happy Family Delusion , i.e., that we are selected for cooperation with everyone, and that the euphonious ideals of Democracy, Diversity and Equality  will lead us into utopia, if we just manage things correctly (the possibility of politics).  Again, the No Free Lunch Principle ought to warn us it cannot be true, and we see throughout history and all over the contemporary world, that without strict controls, selfishness and stupidity gain the upper hand and soon destroy any nation that embraces it. In addition, the monkey mind steeply discounts the future, and so we cooperate in selling our descendant’s heritage for temporary comforts, greatly exacerbating the problems.

I describe versions of this delusion (i.e., that we are basically ‘friendly’ if just given a chance) as it appears in some recent books on sociology/biology/economics. I end with an essay on the great tragedy playing out in America and the world, which can be seen as a direct result of our evolved psychology manifested as the inexorable machinations of System 1.  Our psychology, eminently adaptive and eugenic on the plains of Africa from ca. 6 million years ago, when we split from chimpanzees, to ca. 50,000 years ago, when many of our ancestors left Africa (i.e., in the EEA or Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation), is now maladaptive and dysgenic and the source of our Suicidal Utopian Delusions. So, like all discussions of behavior (philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology, politics, law, literature, history, economics, soccer strategies, business meetings, etc.), this book is about evolutionary strategies, selfish genes and inclusive fitness (kin selection).
The great mystic Osho said that the separation of God and Heaven from Earth and Humankind was the most evil idea that ever entered the Human mind.  In the 20th century an even more evil notion arose—that humans are born with rights, rather than having to earn privileges.  Thus every day the population increases by 200,000, who must be provided with resources to grow and space to live, and who soon produce another 200,000 etc.  And one almost never hears it noted that what they receive must be taken from those already alive. Their lives diminish those already here in both major obvious and countless subtle ways.  Every new baby destroys the earth from the moment of conception. There cannot be human rights without human wrongs.  It cannot be more obvious, but one will never see the streets full of protesters with banners protesting motherhood.

America and the world are in the process of collapse from excessive population growth, most of it for the last century and now all of it due to 3rd world people. Consumption of resources and the addition of 4 billion more ca. 2100 will collapse industrial civilization and bring about starvation, disease, violence and war on a staggering scale. Billions will die and nuclear war is all but certain. In America this is being hugely accelerated by massive immigration and immigrant reproduction, combined with abuses made possible by democracy. Depraved human nature inexorably turns the dream of democracy and diversity into a nightmare of crime and poverty. China will continue to overwhelm America and the world, as long as it maintains the dictatorship which limits selfishness. The root cause of collapse is the inability of our innate psychology to adapt to the modern world, which leads people to treat unrelated persons as though they had common interests. This, plus ignorance of basic biology and psychology, leads to the social engineering delusions of the partially educated who control democratic societies.  Few understand that if you help one person you harm someone else—there is no free lunch and every single item anyone consumes destroys the earth beyond repair. Consequently social policies everywhere are unsustainable and one by one all societies without stringent controls on selfishness will collapse into anarchy or dictatorship. Without dramatic and immediate changes, there is no hope for preventing the collapse of America, or any country that follows a democratic system.  Hence my concluding essay “Suicide by Democracy”.

Giữa lúc Kinh tế học chính thống vẫn còn đang thống trị, kể từ thế kỷ XIX, Karl Marx và Thorstein Veblen đã là những người tiên phong trong việc thách thức những tư tưởng của Kinh tế học chính thống. Xuyên suốt hơn 150 năm, trải qua bao sự kiện lịch sử, kinh tế và khoa học, Kinh tế học chính thống vẫn tiếp tục thống trị, nhưng đã ít nhiều xuất hiện những lời phê bình về tính đơn giản hoá thực tế của nó. Trong khi đó, những trường phái mới hơn, phi chính thống, cố gắng đưa ra những quan sát, phân tích xác thực hơn với thực tế, đang dần tìm được vị thế của mình. Thông qua bài viết này, tác giả muốn giới thiệu sơ lược tới bạn đọc về ba nhánh Kinh tế học tiến hoá, Kinh tế học hành vi và Kinh tế học phức hợp để cung cấp một cái nhìn tổng quan về cách các trường phái phi chính thống tiếp cận với phân tích kinh tế.

The basic goal of this work is to present the evolution of strategic management theory under the influence of behavioral economics. The work is in a broad resource-based view that has dominated the theoretical concepts of strategic management since the early 1990s. The main resource of modern enterprises is their employees, and above all the managers who manage them.

The first two chapters of the book are introductory and present the evolution of strategic management, as well as the assumptions of behavioral economics. The next four chapters present the growing impact of behavioral concepts on: creating an evolutionary environment in an enterprise, changes in the theory of competing, the evolution of the concept of strategic leadership and creating the value of an enterprise. Chapter seven describes bibliometric research that has shown the growing importance of concepts specific to behavioral economics, as well as strengthening the interdisciplinary nature of strategic management.

Media studies is founded on sophisticated theoretical approaches to the communication and reception of meaning and to the political economy of media ownership, control and regulation. However, the production processes of media organisations have largely remained a theoretical "black box" (Garnham, 2011:51). In a recent debate on this subject (see Dwyer 2015b, 2016) Murdock and Golding (2016) argued that “the central challenge for theories of media production then is to move between levels of analysis and to integrate them”. As Mayer (2009:15) noted “it is this connection between the micro contexts and the macro forces . . . that is so frequently lost in the efforts to describe the current media landscape, its interconnected industries and its networks of professionals”. This chapter, therefore, tries to develop a theory showing the causal relationships between these levels – macro (economics and political economy), meso (organisation studies) and micro (production studies).

A fuller account of the theory is available here: https://www.routledge.com/Understanding-Media-Production/Dwyer/p/book/9781138238145

Inspection copies of the complete book can be ordered here: https://www.routledge.com/textbooks/evaluation/9781138238145

I briefly restate the structure and essential elements of Rawls’s theory of justice to facilitate an understanding of its basic narrative, before examining a few of the critiques of his approach to the question of social justice. Then an approach to that question is developed, based on an evolutionary psychology (EP) understanding wherein knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are used in research on the structure of the human mind. This leads to an understanding of the basic intuitive grasp of the idea of justice and its role in human evolutionary history, which is then formulated in two principles of social justice. This understanding is thereafter related to the Rawlsian narrative and its critiques in a discussion which indicates divergences but also congruencies between the two approaches. It is also noted that the EP approach offers some insights that are lacking in justice as fairness but are in fact supportive of some of its conclusions and arguments. It is further found that the EP approach has important implications for public policy.