ABSTRACT

Ulrich Witt is Director Emeritus of the Evolutionary Economics Research Group at the former Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany, and Adjunct Professor at Griffith Business School, Griffith University, Australia. Afterwards he held numerous positions as professor of economics including at the University of Mannheim, the University of Southern California, and the University of Freiburg. Ulrich Witt was interviewed by Sebastian Berger via phone online in September 2017. The economics department was dominated by mainstream economists and competed with the department for agricultural economics next door. The mainstream doesn't have a theory of preference, except for a few assumptions about formal properties of preference orders such that they imply a certain shape of the utility function. The sciences actually offer an interpretation of human behaviour, and economic agents are humans, after all. Innovators disrupt the existing interactions by doing something not thought of as being possible, acceptable, legitimate.