Evolution and Economy

The starting-point is not price theory, comparative statics or equilibration at the margin. Instead, it is social selection, perpetual motion and adaptation to circumstance: The life of man in society, just like the life of other species, is a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective adaptation. The evolution of social structure has been a process of natural selection of institutions.’ (Veblen, 1899:131). Social life, Veblen said, closely resembles organic life in that it is locked into cumulative causation, disequilibrium states and mutation to avoid extinction: The economic life history of the individual is a cumulative process of adaptation of means to ends that cumulatively change as the process goes on, both the agent and his environment being at any point the outcome of the last process.’ (Veblen, 1919:74–5). Economic activity, Veblen argued, is better understood in the Darwinian context of biological development than it is when flattened into the mathematical mechanics of Newtonian physics. Alfred Marshall wrote that ‘the central idea of economics’ could be nothing other than ‘that of living force and movement’: ‘The Mecca of the economist lies in economic biology.’ (Marshall, 1890:xii–xiii). It is a viewpoint which would be shared by Veblen and by other anthropocentric economists whose focus is the evolution in the structures, the parameters and the rules of the game.