economic theory

When I was in journalism school many years ago, a professor remarked that business reporters often go through three phases of maturation. At the start, the callous young reporter assumes that all business executives are rich crooks who need to be exposed. As the reporter enters the second phase, he gains access to top executives and discovers that they are much more open, hard-working and smart than they had seemed. In the final phase, the fully-seasoned journalist breaks through to the highest level of awareness: it turns out, there really are a lot of crooks out there.

That’s the feeling I have now. In more than 20 years as a business and economics reporter for The New York Times, I liked nothing more than a good business scandal. But I also considered myself a fan of free markets, opencompetitionand minimal government regulation. I like the dynamism of the marketplace -- the constant turbulence, the risk-taking and the periodic drama of little-known start-ups toppling Goliaths. Microsoft over IBM in personal computers. Google over Microsoft in web-based services. Those things happen, and the public has generally benefitted.

I have been working my way through a fascinating book by Professor Geoffrey Hodgson, Economics in the Shadows of Darwin and Marx.  They were the two great theorists of structural change in complex systems in the nineteenth century, and I've been looking for new ideas on how their theories have been applied and adapted in modern economic scholarship.  This sentence, in a chapter comparing their worldviews, was too interesting and amusing to keep to myself:

Marx and Engels characterized Darwin's doctrine as an inappropriate extension of the norms of capitalist competition to the natural world.

Enjoy!