ABSTRACT

Economics foreshadowed and indeed inspired the myth or paradigm of biological evolution through Natural Selection. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originators of the doctrine, each avowed indebtedness to Thomas Robert Malthus, a founding figure in classical political economy. Malthus was not himself, however, an evolutionary economist. Nor has mainstream economics since his time pursued to any marked degree evolutionary perspectives, evidently preferring the elegance, mathematical rigor, and political congeniality of essentially static, equilibrium models the pioneered, for instance, by Leon Walras in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thorstein Veblen was asking, "Why is economics not an evolutionary science? The answer emphasized in this chapter to Veblen's query is that mainstream economics' reductionist conception of information/communication minimizes analytical possibilities for acknowledging change. Within Institutional and Evolutionary Economics there are divergent streams from what people take to be a Malthusian origin.