Understanding Economic Change Advances in Evolutionary Economics

Although the economy has always been changing, ever more innovations now seem to accelerate the transformation process. Are there any laws governing the incessant global change? Does it accord with our intentions and desires and make us happier? Do our institutions and our democracies cope with the challenges? How does economic theory explain what is going on? In this volume, experts in the field discuss the advances that evolutionary economics has made in exploring questions like these. The broad range of topics include a review of the development of the field: its conceptual and methodological characteristics are outlined; problems posed by macroeconomic evolution and the institutional challenges are highlighted; and, last but not least, the implications of the evolution of the economy for wellbeing and sustainability are addressed. Taken together, the contributions demonstrate the potential of an evolutionary paradigm for making sense of economic change and for assessing its consequences.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Evolutionary economics: taking stock of its progress and emerging challenges Ulrich Witt and Andreas Chai; Part II. Conceptual and Methodological Problems: 2. Missed connections and opportunities foregone: a counterfactual history of twentieth century economics Brian J. Loasby; 3. Science, technology, and knowledge: what historians can learn from an evolutionary approach Joel Mokyr; 4. Generalized Darwinism in evolutionary economics: the devil is in the details Jack Vromen; Part III. Perspectives on Evolutionary Macroeconomics: 5. Macroeconomic evolution: long run development and short run policies Richard H. Day; 6. Evolutionary micro-founded technical change and the Kaldor-Verdoorn law: estimates from an artificial world André Lorentz; Part IV. Advances in Explaining and Assessing Institutional Evolution: 7. Democracy, rationality and religion Dennis C. Mueller; 8. On the evolution of organizational governance: divided governance and survival in the long run Roger D. Congleton; 9. Strategic interaction and externalities: FD-games and pollution Reinoud Joosten; 10. Fairness in urban land use: an evolutionary contribution to law and economics Christian Schubert; Part V. Evolutionary Perspectives on Welfare and Sustainability: 11. As innovations drive economic change, do they also improve our welfare? Martin Binder and Ulrich Witt; 12. Sustainable consumption patterns and the malleability of consumer preferences: an evolutionary perspective Andreas Chai.

Ulrich Witt is Past Director of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany. He has published a vast number of articles and books on evolutionary economics and is Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Bioeconomics.
Andreas Chai is an applied economist and Head of Economics and Business Statistics at Griffith University, Australia. Andreas has published in various economic journals, including the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the Cambridge Journal of Economics.