商品詳細

Economic theory is currently at a crossroads. While in some quarters, the preoccupation with a narrow, and largely empty, formalism reaches unprecedented heights, many leading mainstream economists are calling for a more realistic and practical orientation for economic science. Indeed, there are now many voices suggesting that economics should be reconstructed on evolutionary lines, and a new "evolutionary economics" has emerged from the 1980s. This book is about the application to economics of evolutionary ideas learnt from biology. It contains an examiniation of evolutionary ideas in past economic thinkers, including Mandeville, Malthus, Smith, Marx, Menger, Marshall, Veblen, Schumpeter and Hayek. Hodgson argues that the new evolutionary economics can learn much from the differing conceptions of economic evolution which have been developed in the past. "Economics and Evolution" is a companion volume to "Economics and Institutions", by the same author.