ABSTRACT
Introduction In this introduction, we will discuss the diffusion of Western Economics in general and in East Asia in particular. We will deal with a region which has experienced unprecedented changes on the road to modernity in the last one and a half centuries (see Woodside, 2006), as well as extraordinary economic growth over the last half-decade (see Das, 2015). New ideas, we will argue, were introduced by a process of diffusion which was likely to involve a process of evolutionary selection, unrestricted by the type of innovation examined, the adopters involved and the place or culture (see Rogers, 1962). Another more recent work regards the work of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) as a ‘guiding light’ here (see Hodgson and Knudsen, 2010). But yet another theorist, Nelson (2005) thinks that:
[E]volutionary theorizing in the social sciences goes back well before Darwin. The writings of Bernard Mandeville [1670-1723] (1724), and Adam Smith [1723-1790] (1776), to name two well-known 18th century authors, [as well as David Hume [1711-1776] (see 1739)] are rich in theorizing about cultural and economic change that has a strong evolutionary flavor. That tradition of empirically oriented evolutionary social science has continued to the present time.
