American Enlightenment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

American Enlightenment

1732–1845
Thomas Paine
Including	American philosophy
Preceded by	European Enlightenment
Followed by	American Revolution
Leader(s)	Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington

The American Enlightenment was a period of intellectual ferment in the thirteen American colonies in the 18th to 19th century, which led to the American Revolution, and the creation of the United States of America. The American Enlightenment was influenced by the 17th-century European Enlightenment and its own native American philosophy. According to James MacGregor Burns, the spirit of the American Enlightenment was to give Enlightenment ideals a practical, useful form in the life of the nation and its people.

The American Enlightenment applied scientific reasoning to politics, science, and religion. It promoted religious tolerance and restored literature, arts, and music as important disciplines worthy of study in colleges. A non-denominational moral philosophy replaced theology in many college curricula. Some colleges reformed their curricula to include natural philosophy (science), modern astronomy, and mathematics, and "new-model" American style colleges were founded. Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon economic liberty, republicanism and religious tolerance, as clearly expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle, and revealed religion, resulting in an inclination toward deism among some major political leaders of the age.

Among the foremost representatives of the American Enlightenment were presidents of colleges, including Puritan religious leaders Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Clap, and Ezra Stiles, and Anglican moral philosophers Samuel Johnson and William Smith. The leading political thinkers were John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Paine, George Mason, James Wilson, Ethan Allen, and Alexander Hamilton, and polymaths Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The term "American Enlightenment" was coined in the post-World War II era, and was not used in the eighteenth century when English speakers commonly referred to a process of becoming "enlightened."

Dates

Various dates for the American Enlightenment have been proposed, including 1750–1820, 1765–1815, and 1688–1815. One more precise start date proposed is 1714, when a collection of Enlightenment books by Jeremiah Dummer were donated to the library of the college of Yale in Connecticut. They were received by a post-graduate student Samuel Johnson, who studied them. He found that they contradicted his Puritan learning. He wrote that, "All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind", and that he found himself as if "emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day". Two years later in 1716 as a Yale Tutor, Johnson introduced a new curriculum into Yale using Dummer's donated Enlightenment books. Johnson offered what he called "The New Learning", which included the works and ideas of Francis Bacon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Copernicus, and literary works by Shakespeare, Milton, and Addison. Enlightenment ideas were introduced to the colonists and diffused through Puritan educational and religious networks especially through Yale College in 1718.

Religious tolerance

Enlightened Founding Fathers, especially Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington, fought for and eventually attained religious freedom for minority denominations. According to the founding fathers, the United States should be a country where peoples of all faiths could live in peace and mutual benefit. James Madison summed up this ideal in 1792 saying, "Conscience is the most sacred of all property."

A switch away from established religion to religious tolerance was one of the distinguishing features of the era from 1775 to 1818. The passage of the new Connecticut Constitution in 1818 has been proposed as a date for the triumph if not the end of the American Enlightenment. That new constitution overturned the 180-year-old "Standing Order" and The Connecticut Charter of 1662, whose provisions dated back to the founding of the state in 1638 and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. The new constitution guaranteed freedom of religion and disestablished the Congregational church.

Intellectual currents

The American Enlightenment on the one hand grew from works of European political thinkers such as Montaigne, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, who themselves derived ideas about democracy from admiring accounts of American Indian governmental structures brought back from European travelers to the “new world” after 1500. Concepts of freedom and modern democratic ideals were born in "Native American wigwams” and found permanence in Voltaire's Huron. While between 1714 and 1818, an intellectual change took place that seemed to change the British Colonies of America from a distant backwater into a leader in various fields — moral philosophy, educational reform, religious revival, industrial technology, science, and, most notably, political philosophy, the roots of this change were home grown. America saw a consensus on a "pursuit of happiness" based political structure based in large part on Native sources, however misunderstood.

A non-denominational moral philosophy replaced theology in many college curricula. Yale College and the College of William & Mary were reformed. Even Puritan colleges such as the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and Harvard University reformed their curricula to include natural philosophy (science), modern astronomy, and mathematics. Additionally, "new-model" American style colleges were founded, such as King's College New York (now Columbia University), and the College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania).

European sources

Sources of the American Enlightenment are many and vary according to time and place. As a result of an extensive book trade with Great Britain, the colonies were well acquainted with European literature almost contemporaneously. Early influences were English writers, including James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, the Viscount Bolingbroke, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (especially the two's Cato's Letters), and Joseph Addison (whose tragedy Cato was extremely popular). A particularly important English legal writer was Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England served as a major influence on the American Founders and is a key source in the development Anglo-American common law. Although John Locke's Two Treatises of Government has long been cited as a major influence on American thinkers, historians David Lundberg and Henry F. May demonstrate that Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding was far more widely read than were his political Treatises.

The Scottish Enlightenment also influenced American thinkers. David Hume's Essays and his History of England were widely read in the colonies, and Hume's political thought had a particular influence on James Madison and the Constitution. Another important Scottish writer was Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson's ideas of ethics, along with notions of civility and politeness developed by the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Addison and Richard Steele in their Spectator, were a major influence on upper-class American colonists who sought to emulate European manners and learning.

By far the most important French sources to the American Enlightenment were Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations. Both informed early American ideas of government and were major influences on the Constitution. Voltaire's histories were widely read but seldom cited. Rousseau's influence was marginal. Noah Webster used Rousseau's educational ideas of child development to structure his famous Speller. A German influence includes Samuel Pufendorf, whose writings were also commonly cited by American writers.

Science

Leading scientists during the American Enlightenment included Benjamin Franklin for his work on electricity, William Smith for his organization and observations of the Transit of Venus, Jared Eliot for his work in metallurgy and agriculture, the astronomer David Rittenhouse in astronomy, math, and instruments, Benjamin Rush in medical science, Charles Willson Peale in natural history, and Cadwallader Colden for his work in botany and town sanitation. Colden's daughter, Jane Colden, was the first female botanist working in America. Count Rumford was a leading scientist, especially in the field of heat.

Architecture, arts, and culture

After 1780, the Federal-style of American Architecture began to diverge from the Georgian style and became a uniquely American genre; in 1813, the American architect Ithiel Town designed and in 1814–1816 built the first Gothic Style church in North America, Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, predating the English Gothic revival by a decade. In the fields of literature, poetry, music, and drama some nascent artistic attempts were made, particularly in pre-war Philadelphia, but American (non-popular) culture in these fields was largely imitative of British culture for most of the period.

Republicanism

American republicanism emphasized consent of the governed, riddance of the aristocracy, and resistance towards corruption. It represented the convergence of classical republicanism and English republicanism (of 17th century Commonwealthmen and 18th century English Country Whigs).

J.G.A. Pocock explained the intellectual sources in America:

The Whig canon and the neo-Harringtonians, John Milton, James Harrington and Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon and Bolingbroke, together with the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters of the tradition as far as Montesquieu, formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar: a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded on property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia); established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion); and the promotion of a monied interest—though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement.

Liberalism and republicanism

Since the 1960s, historians have debated the Enlightenment's role in the American Revolution. Before 1960 the consensus was that liberalism, especially that of John Locke, was paramount; republicanism was largely ignored. The new interpretations were pioneered by J.G.A. Pocock who argued in The Machiavellian Moment (1975) that, at least in the early eighteenth-century, republican ideas were just as important as liberal ones. Pocock's view is now widely accepted. Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood pioneered the argument that the Founding Fathers of the United States were more influenced by republicanism than they were by liberalism. Isaac Kramnick, on the other hand, argues that Americans have always been highly individualistic and therefore Lockean.

In the decades before the American Revolution (1776), the intellectual and political leaders of the colonies studied history intently, looking for guides or models for good (and bad) government. They especially followed the development of republican ideas in England. Pocock explained the intellectual sources in the United States:

The Whig canon and the neo-Harringtonians, John Milton, James Harrington and Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon and Bolingbroke, together with the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters of the tradition as far as Montesquieu, formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar: a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded on property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia), established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion) and the promotion of a monied interest—though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement. A neoclassical politics provided both the ethos of the elites and the rhetoric of the upwardly mobile, and accounts for the singular cultural and intellectual homogeneity of the Founding Fathers and their generation.

The commitment of most Americans to these republican values made inevitable the American Revolution, for Britain was increasingly seen as corrupt and hostile to republicanism, and a threat to the established liberties the Americans enjoyed.

Leopold von Ranke, a leading German historian, in 1848 claims that American republicanism played a crucial role in the development of European liberalism:

By abandoning English constitutionalism and creating a new republic based on the rights of the individual, the North Americans introduced a new force in the world. Ideas spread most rapidly when they have found adequate concrete expression. Thus republicanism entered our Romanic/Germanic world... Up to this point, the conviction had prevailed in Europe that monarchy best served the interests of the nation. Now the idea spread that the nation should govern itself. But only after a state had actually been formed on the basis of the theory of representation did the full significance of this idea become clear. All later revolutionary movements have this same goal... This was the complete reversal of a principle. Until then, a king who ruled by the grace of God had been the center around which everything turned. Now the idea emerged that power should come from below... These two principles are like two opposite poles, and it is the conflict between them that determines the course of the modern world. In Europe the conflict between them had not yet taken on concrete form; with the French Revolution it did.

"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

Many historians find that the origin of this famous phrase derives from Locke's position that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." Others suggest that Jefferson took the phrase from Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Others note that William Wollaston's 1722 book The Religion of Nature Delineated describes the "truest definition" of "natural religion" as being "The pursuit of happiness by the practice of reason and truth."

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written by George Mason and adopted by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on June 12, 1776, a few days before Jefferson's draft, in part, reads:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights ... namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

The United States Declaration of Independence, which was primarily written by Thomas Jefferson, was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The text of the second section of the Declaration of Independence reads:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Deism

Both the Moderate Enlightenment and a Radical or Revolutionary Enlightenment were reactions against the authoritarianism, irrationality, and obscurantism of the established churches. Philosophers such as Voltaire depicted organized religion as hostile to the development of reason and the progress of science and incapable of verification.

An alternative religion was deism, the philosophical belief in a deity based on reason, rather than religious revelation or dogma. It was a popular perception among the philosophes, who adopted deistic attitudes to varying degrees. Deism greatly influenced the thought of intellectuals and Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, perhaps George Washington and, especially, Thomas Jefferson. The most articulate exponent was Thomas Paine, whose The Age of Reason was written in France in the early 1790s, and soon reached the United States. Paine was highly controversial; when Jefferson was attacked for his deism in the 1800 election, Democratic-Republican politicians took pains to distance their candidate from Paine. Unitarianism and Deism were strongly connected, the former being brought to America by Joseph Priestley. Doctor Samuel Johnson called Lord Edward Herbert the "father of English Deism".

 

Universal Darwinism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Universal Darwinism (also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, or Darwinian metaphysics) refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, economics, culture, medicine, computer science and physics.

Basic mechanisms

At the most fundamental level, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by an iterative process. This process can be conceived as an evolutionary algorithm that searches the space of possible forms (the fitness landscape) for the ones that are best adapted. The process has three components:

• variation of a given form or template. This is usually (but not necessarily) considered to be blind or random, and happens typically by mutation or recombination.
• selection of the fittest variants, i.e. those that are best suited to survive and reproduce in their given environment. The unfit variants are eliminated.
• heredity or retention, meaning that the features of the fit variants are retained and passed on, e.g. in offspring.

After those fit variants are retained, they can again undergo variation, either directly or in their offspring, starting a new round of the iteration. The overall mechanism is similar to the problem-solving procedures of trial-and-error or generate-and-test: evolution can be seen as searching for the best solution for the problem of how to survive and reproduce by generating new trials, testing how well they perform, eliminating the failures, and retaining the successes.

The generalization made in "universal" Darwinism is to replace "organism" by any recognizable pattern, phenomenon, or system. The first requirement is that the pattern can "survive" (maintain, be retained) long enough or "reproduce" (replicate, be copied) sufficiently frequently so as not to disappear immediately. This is the heredity component: the information in the pattern must be retained or passed on. The second requirement is that during survival and reproduction variation (small changes in the pattern) can occur. The final requirement is that there is a selective "preference" so that certain variants tend to survive or reproduce "better" than others. If these conditions are met, then, by the logic of natural selection, the pattern will evolve towards more adapted forms.

Examples of patterns that have been postulated to undergo variation and selection, and thus adaptation, are genes, ideas (memes), theories, technologies, neurons and their connections, words, computer programs, firms, antibodies, institutions, law and judicial systems, quantum states and even whole universes.

History and development

Conceptually, "evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena" preceded Darwin, but was still lacking the concept of natural selection. Darwin himself, together with subsequent 19th-century thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Thorstein Veblen, James Mark Baldwin and William James, was quick to apply the idea of selection to other domains, such as language, psychology, society, and culture. However, this evolutionary tradition was largely banned from the social sciences in the beginning of the 20th century, in part because of the bad reputation of social Darwinism, an attempt to use Darwinism to justify social inequality.

Starting in the 1950s, Donald T. Campbell was one of the first and most influential authors to revive the tradition, and to formulate a generalized Darwinian algorithm directly applicable to phenomena outside of biology. In this, he was inspired by William Ross Ashby's view of self-organization and intelligence as fundamental processes of selection. His aim was to explain the development of science and other forms of knowledge by focusing on the variation and selection of ideas and theories, thus laying the basis for the domain of evolutionary epistemology. In the 1990s, Campbell's formulation of the mechanism of "blind-variation-and-selective-retention" (BVSR) was further developed and extended to other domains under the labels of "universal selection theory" or "universal selectionism" by his disciples Gary Cziko, Mark Bickhard, and Francis Heylighen.

Richard Dawkins may have first coined the term "universal Darwinism" in 1983 to describe his conjecture that any possible life forms existing outside the solar system would evolve by natural selection just as they do on Earth. This conjecture was also presented in 1983 in a paper entitled “The Darwinian Dynamic” that dealt with the evolution of order in living systems and certain nonliving physical systems. It was suggested “that ‘life’, wherever it might exist in the universe, evolves according to the same dynamical law” termed the Darwinian dynamic. Henry Plotkin in his 1997 book on Darwin machines makes the link between universal Darwinism and Campbell's evolutionary epistemology. Susan Blackmore, in her 1999 book The Meme Machine, devotes a chapter titled 'Universal Darwinism' to a discussion of the applicability of the Darwinian process to a wide range of scientific subject matters.

The philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett, in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, developed the idea of a Darwinian process, involving variation, selection and retention, as a generic algorithm that is substrate-neutral and could be applied to many fields of knowledge outside of biology. He described the idea of natural selection as a "universal acid" that cannot be contained in any vessel, as it seeps through the walls and spreads ever further, touching and transforming ever more domains. He notes in particular the field of memetics in the social sciences.

In agreement with Dennett's prediction, over the past decades the Darwinian perspective has spread ever more widely, in particular across the social sciences as the foundation for numerous schools of study including memetics, evolutionary economics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, neural Darwinism, and evolutionary linguistics. Researchers have postulated Darwinian processes as operating at the foundations of physics, cosmology and chemistry via the theories of quantum Darwinism, observation selection effects and cosmological natural selection. Similar mechanisms are extensively applied in computer science in the domains of genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation, which develop solutions to complex problems via a process of variation and selection.

Author D. B. Kelley has formulated one of the most all-encompassing approaches to universal Darwinism. In his 2013 book The Origin of Phenomena, he holds that natural selection involves not the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life, as shown by Darwin, but the preservation of favored systems in contention for existence. The fundamental mechanism behind all such stability and evolution is therefore what Kelley calls "survival of the fittest systems." Because all systems are cyclical, the Darwinian processes of iteration, variation and selection are operative not only among species but among all natural phenomena both large-scale and small. Kelley thus maintains that, since the Big Bang especially, the universe has evolved from a highly chaotic state to one that is now highly ordered with many stable phenomena, naturally selected.

Examples of universal Darwinist theories

The following approaches can all be seen as exemplifying a generalization of Darwinian ideas outside of their original domain of biology. These "Darwinian extensions" can be grouped in two categories, depending on whether they discuss implications of biological (genetic) evolution in other disciplines (e.g. medicine or psychology), or discuss processes of variation and selection of entities other than genes (e.g. computer programs, firms or ideas). However, there is no strict separation possible, since most of these approaches (e.g. in sociology, psychology and linguistics) consider both genetic and non-genetic (e.g. cultural) aspects of evolution, as well as the interactions between them (see e.g. gene-culture coevolution).

Gene-based Darwinian extensions

• Evolutionary psychology assumes that our emotions, preferences and cognitive mechanisms are the product of natural selection
  • Evolutionary educational psychology applies evolutionary psychology to education
  • Evolutionary developmental psychology applies evolutionary psychology to cognitive development
  • Darwinian Happiness applies evolutionary psychology to understand the optimal conditions for human well-being
  • Darwinian literary studies tries to understand the characters and plots of narrative on the basis of evolutionary psychology
  • Evolutionary aesthetics applies evolutionary psychology to explain our sense of beauty, especially for landscapes and human bodies
  • Evolutionary musicology applies evolutionary aesthetics to music
• Evolutionary anthropology studies the evolution of human beings
• Sociobiology proposes that social systems in animals and humans are the product of Darwinian biological evolution
• Human behavioral ecology investigates how human behavior has become adapted to its environment via variation and selection
• Evolutionary epistemology of mechanisms studies how our abilities to gather knowledge (perception, cognition) have evolved
• Evolutionary medicine investigates the origin of diseases by looking at the evolution both of the human body and of its parasites
• Paleolithic diet proposes that the most healthy nutrition is the one to which our hunter-gatherer ancestors have adapted over millions of years
• Paleolithic lifestyle generalizes the paleolithic diet to include exercise, behavior and exposure to the environment
• Molecular evolution studies evolution at the level of DNA, RNA and proteins
• Biosocial criminology studies crime using several different approaches that include genetics and evolutionary psychology
• Evolutionary linguistics studies the evolution of language, biologically as well as culturally

Other Darwinian extensions

• Quantum Darwinism sees the emergence of classical states in physics as a natural selection of the most stable quantum properties
• Cosmological natural selection hypothesizes that universes reproduce and are selected for having fundamental constants that maximize "fitness"
• Complex adaptive systems models the dynamics of complex systems in part on the basis of the variation and selection of its components
• Evolutionary computation is a Darwinian approach to the generation of adapted computer programs
• Genetic algorithms, a subset of evolutionary computation, models variation by "genetic" operators (mutation and recombination)
• Evolutionary robotics applies Darwinian algorithms to the design of autonomous robots
• Artificial life uses Darwinian algorithms to let organism-like computer agents evolve in a software simulation
• Evolutionary art uses variation and selection to produce works of art
• Evolutionary music does the same for works of music
• Clonal selection theory sees the creation of adapted antibodies in the immune system as a process of variation and selection
• Neural Darwinism proposes that neurons and their synapses are selectively pruned during brain development
• Evolutionary epistemology of theories assumes that scientific theories develop through variation and selection
• Memetics is a theory of the variation, transmission, and selection of cultural items, such as ideas, fashions, and traditions
• Dual inheritance theory a framework for cultural evolution developed largely independently of memetics
• Cultural selection theory is a theory of cultural evolution related to memetics
• Cultural materialism is an anthropological approach that contends that the physical world impacts and sets constraints on human behavior.
• Environmental determinism is a social science theory that proposes that it is the environment that ultimately determines human culture.
• Evolutionary economics studies the variation and selection of economic phenomena, such as commodities, technologies, institutions and organizations.
• Evolutionary ethics investigates the origin of morality, and uses Darwinian foundations to formulate ethical values
• Big History is the science-based narrative integrating the history of the universe, earth, life, and humanity. Scholars consider Universal Darwinism to be a possible unifying theme for the discipline.

Books

• Campbell, John. Universal Darwinism: the path of knowledge.
• Cziko, Gary. Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution.
• Hodgson, Geoffrey Martin; Knudsen, Thorbjorn. Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution.
• Kelley, D. B. The Origin of Everything via Universal Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Systems in Contention for Existence.
• Plotkin, Henry. Evolutionary Worlds without End.
• Plotkin, Henry. Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge.
• Dennett, Daniel. Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Evolutionary economics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_economics

Evolutionary economics is part of mainstream economics as well as a heterodox school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Much like mainstream economics, it stresses complex interdependencies, competition, growth, structural change, and resource constraints but differs in the approaches which are used to analyze these phenomena.

Evolutionary economics deals with the study of processes that transform economy for firms, institutions, industries, employment, production, trade and growth within, through the actions of diverse agents from experience and interactions, using evolutionary methodology. Evolutionary economics analyzes the unleashing of a process of technological and institutional innovation by generating and testing a diversity of ideas which discover and accumulate more survival value for the costs incurred than competing alternatives. The evidence suggests that it could be adaptive efficiency that defines economic efficiency. Mainstream economic reasoning begins with the postulates of scarcity and rational agents (that is, agents modeled as maximizing their individual welfare), with the "rational choice" for any agent being a straightforward exercise in mathematical optimization. There has been renewed interest in treating economic systems as evolutionary systems in the developing field of Complexity economics.

Evolutionary economics does not take the characteristics of either the objects of choice or of the decision-maker as fixed. Rather, its focus is on the non-equilibrium processes that transform the economy from within and their implications. The processes in turn emerge from actions of diverse agents with bounded rationality who may learn from experience and interactions and whose differences contribute to the change. The subject draws more recently on evolutionary game theory and on the evolutionary methodology of Charles Darwin and the non-equilibrium economics principle of circular and cumulative causation. It is naturalistic in purging earlier notions of economic change as teleological or necessarily improving the human condition.

A different approach is to apply evolutionary psychology principles to economics which is argued to explain problems such as inconsistencies and biases in rational choice theory. Basic economic concepts such as utility may be better viewed as due to preferences that maximized evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment but not necessarily in the current one.

Predecessors

In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx presented a schema of stages of historical development, by introducing the notion that human nature was not constant and was not determinative of the nature of the social system; on the contrary, he made it a principle that human behavior was a function of the social and economic system in which it occurred.

Marx based his theory of economic development on the premise of developing economic systems; specifically, over the course of history superior economic systems would replace inferior ones. Inferior systems were beset by internal contradictions and inefficiencies that make them impossible to survive over the long term. In Marx's scheme, feudalism was replaced by capitalism, which would eventually be superseded by socialism.

At approximately the same time, Charles Darwin developed a general framework for comprehending any process whereby small, random variations could accumulate and predominate over time into large-scale changes that resulted in the emergence of wholly novel forms ("speciation").

This was followed shortly after by the work of the American pragmatic philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey) and the founding of two new disciplines, psychology and anthropology, both of which were oriented toward cataloging and developing explanatory frameworks for the variety of behavior patterns (both individual and collective) that were becoming increasingly obvious to all systematic observers. The state of the world converged with the state of the evidence to make almost inevitable the development of a more "modern" framework for the analysis of substantive economic issues.

Veblen (1898)

Thorstein Veblen (1898) coined the term "evolutionary economics" in English. He began his career in the midst of this period of intellectual ferment, and as a young scholar came into direct contact with some of the leading figures of the various movements that were to shape the style and substance of social sciences into the next century and beyond. Veblen saw the need for taking account of cultural variation in his approach; no universal "human nature" could possibly be invoked to explain the variety of norms and behaviors that the new science of anthropology showed to be the rule, rather than the exception. He emphasised the conflict between "industrial" and "pecuniary" or ceremonial values and this Veblenian dichotomy was interpreted in the hands of later writers as the "ceremonial/instrumental dichotomy" (Hodgson 2004);

Veblen saw that every culture is materially based and dependent on tools and skills to support the "life process", while at the same time, every culture appeared to have a stratified structure of status ("invidious distinctions") that ran entirely contrary to the imperatives of the "instrumental" (read: "technological") aspects of group life. The "ceremonial" was related to the past, and conformed to and supported the tribal legends; "instrumental" was oriented toward the technological imperative to judge value by the ability to control future consequences. The "Veblenian dichotomy" was a specialized variant of the "instrumental theory of value" due to John Dewey, with whom Veblen was to make contact briefly at the University of Chicago.

Arguably the most important works by Veblen include, but are not restricted to, his most famous works (The Theory of the Leisure Class; The Theory of Business Enterprise), but his monograph Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution and the 1898 essay entitled Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science have both been influential in shaping the research agenda for following generations of social scientists. TOLC and TOBE together constitute an alternative construction on the neoclassical marginalist theories of consumption and production, respectively.

Both are founded on his dichotomy, which is at its core a valuational principle. The ceremonial patterns of activity are not bound to any past, but to one that generated a specific set of advantages and prejudices that underlie the current institutions. "Instrumental" judgments create benefits according to a new criterion, and therefore are inherently subversive. This line of analysis was more fully and explicitly developed by Clarence E. Ayres of the University of Texas at Austin from the 1920s.

A seminal article by Armen Alchian (1950) argued for adaptive success of firms faced with uncertainty and incomplete information replacing profit maximization as an appropriate modeling assumption. Kenneth Boulding was one of the advocates of the evolutionary methods in social science, as is evident from Kenneth Boulding's Evolutionary Perspective. Kenneth Arrow, Ronald Coase and Douglass North are some of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel winners who are known for their sympathy to the field.

More narrowly the works Jack Downie and Edith Penrose offer many insights for those thinking about evolution at the level of the firm in an industry.

Joseph Schumpeter, who lived in the first half of the 20th century, was the author of the book The Theory of Economic Development (1911, transl. 1934). It is important to note that for the word development he used in his native language, the German word "Entwicklung", which can be translated as development or evolution. The translators of the day used the word "development" from the French "développement", as opposed to "evolution" as this was used by Darwin. (Schumpeter, in his later writings in English as a professor at Harvard, used the word "evolution".) The current term in common use is economic development.

In Schumpeter's book, he proposed an idea radical for its time: the evolutionary perspective. He based his theory on the assumption of usual macroeconomic equilibrium, which is something like "the normal mode of economic affairs". This equilibrium is being perpetually destroyed by entrepreneurs who try to introduce innovations. A successful introduction of an innovation (i.e. a disruptive technology) disturbs the normal flow of economic life, because it forces some of the already existing technologies and means of production to lose their positions within the economy.

Present state of discussion

One of the major contributions to the emerging field of evolutionary economics has been the publication of An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change by Richard Nelson and Sidney G. Winter. These authors have focused mostly on the issue of changes in technology and routines, suggesting a framework for their analysis. If the change occurs constantly in the economy, then some kind of evolutionary process must be in action, and there has been a proposal that this process is Darwinian in nature.

Then, mechanisms that provide selection, generate variation and establish self-replication, must be identified. The authors introduced the term 'steady change' to highlight the evolutionary aspect of economic processes and contrast it with the concept of 'steady state' popular in classical economics. Their approach can be compared and contrasted with the population ecology or organizational ecology approach in sociology: see Douma & Schreuder (2013, chapter 11). More recently, Nelson, Dosi, Pyka, Malerba, Winter and other scholars have been proposing an update of the state-of-art in evolutionary economics.

Milton Friedman proposed that markets act as major selection vehicles. As firms compete, unsuccessful rivals fail to capture an appropriate market share, go bankrupt and have to exit. The variety of competing firms is both in their products and practices, that are matched against markets. Both products and practices are determined by routines that firms use: standardized patterns of actions implemented constantly. By imitating these routines, firms propagate them and thus establish inheritance of successful practices. A general theory of this process has been proposed by Kurt Dopfer, John Foster and Jason Potts as the micro meso macro framework.

Economic processes, as part of life processes, are intrinsically evolutionary. From the evolutionary equation that describe life processes, an analytical formula on the main factors of economic processes, such as fixed cost and variable cost, can be derived. The economic return, or competitiveness, of economic entities of different characteristics under different kinds of environment can be calculated. The change of environment causes the change of competitiveness of different economic entities and systems. This is the process of evolution of economic systems.

In recent years, evolutionary models have been used to assist decision making in applied settings and find solutions to problems such as optimal product design and service portfolio diversification.

Evolutionary Growth Theory

The role of evolutionary forces in the process of economic development over the course of human history has been explored in the past few decades. Oded Galor and Omer Moav advanced the hypothesis that evolutionary forces had a significant role in the transition of the world economy from stagnation to growth, highlighting the persistent effects that historical and prehistorical conditions have had on the evolution of the composition of human characteristics during the development process.

Galor and Moav argued that the Malthusian pressure determined the size and the composition of the human population. Lineages whose traits were complementary to the economic environment had higher income, and therefore higher reproductive success, and the inevitable propagation of these traits fostered the growth process and ultimately contributed to the take-off from an epoch of stagnation to the modern era of sustained growth.

Evolution of predisposition towards child quality

Galor and Moav hypothesize that during the Malthusian epoch, natural selection has amplified the prevalence of traits associated with predispositions towards the child quality in the human population, triggering human capital formation, technological progress, the onset of the demographic transition, and the emergence of  sustained economic growth.

The testable predictions of this evolutionary theory and its underlying mechanisms have been confirmed empirically and quantitatively. Specifically, the genealogical record of half a million people in Quebec during the period 1608-1800, suggests that moderate fecundity, and hence tendency towards investment in child quality, was beneficial for long-run reproductive success. This finding reflect the adverse effect of higher fecundity on marital age of children, their level of education, and the likelihood that they will survive to a reproductive age.

Evolution of time preference

Oded Galor and Omer Ozak examine the evolution of time preference in the course of human history. They hypothesize and establish empirically that agricultural characteristics that were favorable to higher return to agricultural investment in the Malthusian era triggered a process of selection, adaptation, and learning that increase the prevalence of long-term orientation among individuals in society. They further establish the variations in these agricultural characteristics across the globe are associated with contemporary differences in economic and human behavior such as technological adoption, education, saving, and smoking.

Evolution of loss aversion

Oded Galor and Viacheslav Savitskiy explore the evolutionary foundation of the phenomenon of loss aversion. They theorize and confirm empirically that the evolution of loss aversion reflects an evolutionary process in which humans have gradually adapted the climatic shocks and their asymmetric effects on reproductive success in a period in which the available resource was very close to the subsistence consumption. In particular, they establish that individuals and ethnic groups that descended from regions that are characterized by greater climatic volatility tend to be loss-neutral, whereas those originated in regions in which climatic conditions are more spatially correlated, tend to be more loss averse.

Evolution of risk aversion

Oded Galor and Stelios Michalopoulos examine the coevolution of entrepreneurial spirit and the process of long-run economic development. Specifically, they argue that in the early stages of development, risk-tolerant entrepreneurial traits generated an evolutionary advantage, and the rise in the prevalence of this trait amplified the pace of the growth process. However, in advanced stages of development, risk-aversion gained an evolutionary advantage, and contributed to convergence across countries.

Evolutionary psychology

A different approach is to apply evolutionary psychology principles to economics which is argued to explain problems such as inconsistencies and biases in rational choice theory. A basic economic concept such as utility may be better explained in terms of a set of biological preferences that maximized evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment but not necessarily in the current one. In other words, the preferences for actions/decisions that promise "utility" (e.g. reaching for a piece of cake) were formed in the ancestral environment because of the adaptive advantages of such decisions (e.g. maximizing calorie intake). Loss aversion may be explained as being rational when living at subsistence level where a reduction of resources may have meant death and it thus may have been rational to place a greater value on losses than on gains.

People are sometimes more cooperative and altruistic than predicted by economic theory which may be explained by mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism and group selection for cooperative behavior. An evolutionary approach may also explain differences between groups such as males being less risk-averse than females since males have more variable reproductive success than females. While unsuccessful risk-seeking may limit reproductive success for both sexes, males may potentially increase their reproductive success much more than females from successful risk-seeking. Frequency-dependent selection may explain why people differ in characteristics such as cooperative behavior with cheating becoming an increasingly less successful strategy as the numbers of cheaters increase.

Another argument is that humans have a poor intuitive grasp of the economics of the current environment which is very different from the ancestral environment. The ancestral environment likely had relatively little trade, division of labor, and capital goods. Technological change was very slow, wealth differences were much smaller, and possession of many available resources were likely zero-sum games where large inequalities were caused by various forms of exploitation. Humans, therefore, may have poor intuitive understanding the benefits of free trade (causing calls for protectionism), the value of capital goods (making the labor theory of value appealing), and may intuitively undervalue the benefits of technological development.

There may be a tendency to see the number of available jobs as a zero-sum game with the total number of jobs being fixed which causes people to not realize that minimum wage laws reduce the number of jobs or to believe that an increased number of jobs in other nations necessarily decreases the number of jobs in their own nation. Large income inequality may easily be viewed as due to exploitation rather than as due to individual differences in productivity. This may easily cause poor economic policies, especially since individual voters have few incentives to make the effort of studying societal economics instead of relying on their intuitions since an individual's vote counts for so little and since politicians may be reluctant to take a stand against intuitive views that are incorrect but widely held.

Democratic capitalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Democratic capitalism, also referred to as market democracy, is a political and economic system that combines capitalism and strong social policies. It integrates resource allocation by marginal productivity (synonymous with free-market capitalism), with policies of resource allocation by social entitlement. The policies which characterise the system are enacted by democratic governments.

Democratic capitalism was implemented widely in the 20th century, particularly in Europe and the Western world after the Second World War. The coexistence of capitalism and democracy, particularly in Europe, was supported by the creation of the modern welfare state in the post-war period. The implementation of democratic capitalism typically involves the enactment of policies expanding the welfare state, strengthening the collective bargaining rights of employees, or strengthening competition laws. These policies are enacted in a capitalist economy characterized by the right to private ownership of productive property.

Catholic social teaching offers support for a communitarian form of democratic capitalism with an emphasis on the preservation of human dignity.

Definition

Democratic capitalism is a type of political and economic system characterised by resource allocation according to both marginal productivity and social need, as determined by decisions reached through democratic politics. It is marked by democratic elections, freedom, and rule of law, characteristics typically associated with democracy. It retains a free-market economic system with an emphasis on private enterprise.

Professor of Entrepreneurship Elias G. Carayannis and Arisitidis Kaloudis, Economics Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), describe democratic capitalism as an economic system which combines robust competitiveness with sustainable entrepreneurship, with the aim of innovation and providing opportunities for economic prosperity to all citizens.

Dr Edward Younkins, professor at Wheeling Jesuit University, described democratic capitalism as a “dynamic complex of economic, political, moral-cultural, ideological, and institutional forces”, which serves to maximize social welfare within a free market economy. Youkins states that the system of individual liberty inherent within democratic capitalism supports the creation of voluntary associations, such as labour unions.

Philosopher and writer Michael Novak characterised democratic capitalism as a blend of a free-market economy, a limited democratic government, and moral-cultural system with an emphasis on personal freedom. Novak comments that capitalism is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of democracy. He also proposes that the prominence of democratic capitalism in a society is strongly determined by the religious concepts which drive its customs, institutions, and leaders.

History

Early to mid-20th century

The development of democratic capitalism was influenced by several historical factors, including the rapid economic growth following World War One, the Great Depression, and the political and economic ramifications of World War Two. The growing critique of free-market capitalism and the rise of the notion of social justice in political debate contributed to the adoption of democratic capitalist policies.

Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the location of the Bretton Woods Conference

At the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, officials from the United States and the United Kingdom and forty-two other nations committed to trade openness. This commitment was made in conjunction with international guidelines which guaranteed autonomy for each country in responding to economic and social demands of its voters. Officials requested international capital controls which would allow governments to regulate their economies while remaining committed to the goals of full employment and economic growth. The adoption of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade supported free trade, while allowing national governments to retain veto power over trade policy. Such developments saw the incorporation of democratic demands into policies based on capitalist economic logic.

A display of the flags of the nations which participated in the Bretton Woods Conference, located in the Gold Room at Mount Washington Hotel

Democratic capitalism was first widely implemented after the Second World War in the Western world, particularly in North America and Western Europe. Following the severe economic impacts of the war, working classes in the Western world were more inclined to accept capitalist markets in conjunction with political democracy, which enabled a level of social security and improved living standards. In the post-war decades, democratic capitalist policies saw reduced levels of socioeconomic inequality. This was synonymous with the expansion of welfare states, more highly regulated financial and labour markets, and increased political power of labour unions. According to political scientist Wolfgang Merkel, democracy and capitalism coexisted with more complementarity at this time than at any other point in history.

Policy makers in Europe and Asia adopted democratic capitalist policies in an attempt to satisfy the social needs of their voters and respond to the challenge of communism. The policies implemented supported the public provision of medical care, improved public housing, aged care, and more accessible education. Guarantees of full employment and the support of private research and innovation became priorities of policy makers. Policy developments were based on the rising notion that free markets required some state intervention to maintain them, provide structure, and address social inequities caused by them. Governments around the world regulated existing markets in an attempt to increase their equity and effectiveness. In order to stabilise the business cycle, the role of government was reconceived by anticommunist leaders in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, and Japan. An emphasis was placed on supporting economic growth, promoting innovation, and enhancing living standards. This saw the expansion of educational opportunities and public insurance of basic health and aged benefits.

United States

As automated production expanded in the United States, demand for semi skilled workers increased. Combined with the expansion of secondary education, this saw the development of a large working class. The resulting strong economic growth and improved income equality allowed for greater social peace and universal suffrage. Capitalism was viewed as a means of producing the wealth which maintained political freedom, while a democratic government ensured accountable political institutions and an educated labour force with its basic rights fulfilled.

Europe

In the postwar period, free market economic systems with political systems of democracy and welfare states were established in France and Germany. This occurred under the leadership of the Popular Republican Movement in France and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany.

Late 20th century

Following the oil shocks of the 1970s and the productivity slowdown in the United States in the 1980s, politicians and voters maintained strong support for democratic capitalist policies and free markets. Globalisation and free trade were promoted as a means of boosting economic growth, and this saw the formation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Union. Labour market and competition regulations were eased in existing free-market economies, particularly in Anglo-America.

Rapid technological innovation and globalisation brought widespread international economic change. Publicly funded democratic capitalist policies were designed and implemented to compensate individuals negatively affected by major, structural economic change. Implemented beginning in the early years of the Cold War, such policies included unemployment benefits, universal or partially universal healthcare, and aged pensions. Post-1970s, the number of public sector jobs available expanded. Ageing populations in Europe, Japan and North America saw large increases in public spending on pensions and healthcare. In the 1980s, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development economies began reducing corporate taxation, though personal income taxes and public spending on social security programs generally remained stable.

Large-scale innovation in production technology throughout the 20th century had widespread economic benefits in many capitalist economies. These benefits contributed to the conciliation of democratic politics and free markets and the widespread acceptance of democratic capitalist policies by voters.

From the late 20th century, the tenets of democratic capitalism expanded more broadly beyond North America and Western Europe.

United States

Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States

After taking office as president in 1981, Ronald Reagan advocated for a reduced role of government, while responding to voters’ skepticism of liberal capitalism by maintaining strong public sector spending. Many voters doubted the ability of free market capitalism to provide consistent peace, security and opportunity, and sought improved living standards, aged care, and educational opportunities for youth. The Reagan administration maintained previous levels of government expenditure on Social Security and Medicare as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP). Total government expenditure levels as a percentage of GDP also remained stable under the Reagan administration.

Europe

From the mid-1980s, European leaders began endorsing neoliberal ideas, such as those associated with Reaganomics and Thatcherism, based on the notion of the interdependence of economic and social policy. In this context, European competition law policy developed as a method of curbing the excesses of capitalism, while aligning the economy of the European Union with the existing democratic ideals of European society. This saw the advancement of democratic capitalism throughout the European region.

South Africa

The South African Competition Act of 1998 prioritised the eradication of anticompetitive business practices and the free participation in the economy of all citizens, while maintaining a pro-free-market economy.

Early 21st century

India

India enacted the Competition Act, 2002 to promote and sustain competition and protect the welfare of market participants, goals synonymous with democratic capitalism.

Implementation

The post-war implementation of democratic capitalism saw the expansion of welfare states and the free collective bargaining rights of employees, alongside market policies designed to ensure full employment.

Under democratic capitalism, an autonomous democratic state enacts of policies which in effect create a compromise between upper and lower classes, while remaining compatible with free-market capitalism. Such policies include the establishment or expansion of a welfare state, as a method of mediating social class conflict and catering to the demands of workers.

The system is characterised by the establishment of cooperative economic institutions. This includes institutions which facilitate bargaining between government bodies and business and labour organisations such as unions, and those which regulate the relationships between employees and management within private firms. The development of institutions to promote cooperation among public and private economic entities acknowledges the benefits of market competition, while attempting to address the social problems of unrestrained capitalism.

Economic security concerns of citizens are addressed through redistributive policies. Such policies include income transfers, such as welfare payment programs and pensions, to support the financial needs of the elderly and the poor. Other policies which promote economic security include social insurance, and the fiscal financing of education and job training programs to stimulate employment.

The right to private ownership of productive property is a central tenet of democratic capitalism, and is recognized as a basic liberty of all democratic citizens, as in a regular free-market capitalist economy. According to political philosopher John Tomasi, democratic capitalism addresses social entitlement and justice concerns through the preservation of citizens’ private property rights, allowing citizens to be “free, equal, and self-governing”.

The robust competitiveness and sustainable entrepreneurship which define democratic capitalism are characterised by top-down policies and bottom-up initiatives implemented by democratic governments. Top-down policies are planned and implemented by formal leaders in an organisation, while bottom-up policies involve gradual change initiated and sustained by lower-level members of organisations. Policies implemented are designed to incentivise public and private sector innovation. Examples include strong research and development funding, and policies which protect intellectual property rights.

Competition law

A characteristic of democratic capitalist economies is the democratic enactment of laws and regulations to support competition. Such laws include United States antitrust laws. Competition laws are designed to regulate private sector activities, including the actions of capital asset owners and managers, in order to prevent outcomes which are socially undesirable according to the democratic majority.

The implementation of competition law is intended to prevent anti-competitive behaviour that is harmful to the welfare of consumers, while maintaining a free market economy. The implementation of antitrust laws was found to be a characteristic of democratic capitalism specifically, and not regular free-market capitalism.

Conflicts between notions of resource allocation

According to economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, the capitalist markets and democratic policies that characterise democratic capitalism are inherently conflicting. Streeck suggests that under democratic capitalism, governments tend to neglect policies of resource allocation by marginal productivity in favour of those of resource allocation by social entitlement, or vice versa. In particular, he comments that the accelerating inflation of the 1970s in the Western world can be attributed to rising trade-union wage pressure in labour markets and the political priority of full employment, both of which are synonymous with democratic capitalism.

In Catholic social teaching

Pope John Paul II, author of Centesimus annus

Catholic texts offer support for a form of socially regulated democratic capitalism. The papal encyclical Centesimus annus, written by Pope John Paul II, emphasizes a vision of a communitarian form of democratic capitalism. The communitarian system of democratic capitalism described promotes respect for individual rights and basic workers’ rights, a virtuous community, and a limited role for the state and the market. According to the encyclical, these characteristics should be combined with a conscious effort to promote institutions which develop character in individuals. The encyclical stressed to decision makers the importance of the dignity of the person and a concern for the poor, while acknowledging the need to balance economic efficiency with social equity. The US Bishops’ 1986 Pastoral Letter Economic Justice for All suggested that specific institutional arrangements be developed to support this form of democratic capitalism. Arrangements proposed included structures of accountability designed to involve all stakeholders, such as employees, customers, local communities, and wider society, in the corporate decision making process, as opposed to stockholders only. The letter offered acceptance for the market economy under the condition that the state intervene where necessary to preserve human dignity.