On the Nature of Knowledge: An evolutionary perspective

Knowledge comes in two opposed forms – as structural property and as a process. Their interaction - in the time dimension as well as along a logical dimension - characterizes the evolution of knowledge. Knowledge only works, i.e. evolutes, via its presence in carrier media; be it books, hard disks or human brains. Embedding specifications and development of carrier media in an understanding of knowledge evolution is a pivotal step towards an understanding of what could be considered as progress in human societies. Indeed the impact of the ICT revolution of the last decades is now just only surfacing; it will show how important scientific advance in this field is. Knowledge comes in pieces, in units of something that could be called language (in a wider sense). As an over boarding science of linguistics points out these pieces are organized, they form an evolutionary network. The opposing network element types, nodes and (directed) links, reflect the above mentioned opposed forms. In a sense language still is a natural phenomenon, one that provides knowledge about nature. Nature as process as well as natural structure comes into perspective as knowledge. The paper discusses these three aspects and will position them relative to major scientific contributions from various disciplines. In a final conclusion the consequences for the methodology of evolutionary economics will be drawn.information; knowledge; language; evolutionary economics

Endogenous Needs, Values and Technology

Standard economic textbooks usually start with the assumptions that there exists • a set of representative consumers with exogenously given, fixed preference structures, • a set of representative production units with exogenously given, fixed production functions, • a set of identical market mechanisms determining a vector of endogenous prices enabling coordination of optimisation of the former two types of representative agents. Economic history shows that the last two hundred years of evolution in most advanced was mainly characterized by • an incredible change of dimensions and quantities of goods and services keeping preference structures in permanent flux, • an enormous amount of entry, exit and modification of production units and their corresponding production processes, • market mechanisms are constantly diversifying; the actual, observed price vector being the result of a multitude of market institutions that represent locally and temporarily frozen political and economic forces. Standard economic textbooks thus are simply inadequate to deal with economic facts, critique from science and practice righteously is booming. The following arguments will sketch a modelling framework that turns these inadequate methodological assumptions upside down: Needs that motivate consumers are explained endogenously. The growth of the heterogeneous set of households is made explicit. Evolution of technology is endogenously determined namely as strategic necessity of a changing structure of production units. Finally the forms of social organisation are assumed to be modelled explicitly, or, more precisely, the framework enabling the model-builder to formulate a specific, temporarily valid set of fixations regulating interactions in a society is characterized. While this last module concerns the more or less institutionalised outcome of struggling and bargaining of the involved agents – thus is meant to render at least some temporary stability by being itself stable – the other two modules (needs and technology) are far more volatile. Of course, in the long-run they all are interdependent. It follows that from a logical point of view the forms of social organization - i.e. the temporary stable arrangements of a given society for a given historical era – are the starting point to be developed first.needs; value; technology; evolutionary economics

New Combinations :Taking Schumpeter's concept serious

Schumpeter’s idea that innovations can be described as new combinations often is understood as a mere metaphor and slight generalization of what he considers as the characterizing feature of entrepreneurship. The main argument of this paper is that more and deeper issues are involved in the concept of new combinations than is commonly understood. Moreover, a proper understanding of these issues would not only enhance our knowledge about observed innovation processes in economic life, it might reveal several properties common to creative processes in general.Innovation; Schumpeter; new combination

The Survival of the Fattest. Evolution of needs, lust and social value in a long-run perspective

As recent data on average weight of human individuals in OECD countries vividly documents the primary metabolism of human individuals, e.g. physical reproduction, already produces deteriorating results. The concept of needs in the sense of desires for primary reproduction necessities has to be re-conceptualized. What has been substituted for the power of needs was the desire for lust: Consumers are offered objects for which they subjectively should develop a substitute of an objective need, namely lust to consume. While the former concept (needs) has a physiologically rather limited range of extension, the latter one enables an evolutionary expanding dynamic with no evident limitation in sight. It is this contradiction that inspired the question posed in the title of this paper. To formulate it less metaphorical: If the demand side of the evolutionary development of modern societies is concentrating more and more on the emergence of goods and services that are independent of the primary metabolism of humans, will there be a feedback on this primary metabolism that endangers its further processing? In hindsight the history of economic thought can be interpreted as providing answers to this type of questions in the form of theories of social values. A common denominator of these theories – perhaps the smallest one – is the contention that a model of the mentioned contradiction has to incorporate a systemic valuation system. Activities of members of societies should be regulated by a superimposed and commonly understood mechanism. While early contributions favored control by a set of direct behavioral rules, a command list, authors since Adam Smith in one or the other way refer to indirect regulation of economic activity via price structures. Note that Smith’s argument concerning ‘private vices becoming public benefits’ already related a non-metabolic motive, the lust for profit, with the metabolic notion of social welfare. Smith preaches this contradiction as moral philosophy. Karl Marx puts Smith’s observation in historical perspective; the productivity increasing capitalist system will be a necessary but finite episode in human history. And he adds an important dimension: The contradiction between private motives and welfare will work only temporarily and will produce another social contradiction, the one between exploiters and exploited. This new amendment explains the central role of Marx’ labor theory of value as a regulation device for the emergence of new contradictions. After Marx two strands of economic theory stand out as cornerstones of theories of social value: Jevon’s price theory and Schumpeter’s price-breakers theory. The former managed to establish itself as mainstream economics till today; the latter – in a self-referential way – seems to re-appear again and again as subversive swarming of theory innovators.evolutionary economics, needs, social value, lust

Signs of reality - reality of signs. Explorations of a pending revolution in political economy.

This paper explores the interaction between the world of information processes in human society and the non-information dynamics, which the latter set out to understand. This broad topic is approached with a focus on evolutionary political economy: It turns out that progress in this scientific discipline seems to depend crucially on a methodological revolution reframing this above mentioned interplay. The paper consists of three parts. After a brief introduction, which sketches the position of the argument in the current epistemological discourse, part 1 sets out to describe the basic methodological ingredients used by evolutionary political economy to describe the ‘reality’ of socioeconomic dynamics. Part 2 jumps to the world of languages used and proposes a rather radical break with the received apparatus of analytical mathematics used so successfully in sciences studying non-living phenomena. The development of procedural simulation languages should substitute inadequate mathematical formalizations, some examples are provided. Part 3 then returns to ‘reality’ dynamics, but now incorporates the interaction with the information sphere in a small algorithmic model. This model – like the introduction - again makes visible the relationships to earlier research in the field. Instead of a conclusion – several, hopefully innovative ideas are provided in passing, throughout the paper - an epilogue is provided, which tries to indicate the implications of this methodological paper for political practice in face of the current global crisis.Scientific methods, evolutionary political economy, formal languages, ideology

Perplexing Complexity Human Modelling and Primacy of the Group as Essence of Complexity

This paper describes the emergence of complexity as duplicated evolutionary process. The first procedural source of complexity is the quantum jump of the evolution of the human species when it started to maintain certain brain-internal models of its environment. The second - parallel - procedural origin is the evolution of a communication structure, a language, with which an already existing group of primates could frame their internal models. In contrast to definitions of complexity which use the concept in the context of theoretical physics, this approach reveals some perplexing properties of model-building for a special subject of investigation; namely the human species: All adequate models of political economy (economics is just the sub-discipline that freezes political dynamics) have to be complex. Since today’s mainstream economic theory lends its formal apparatus from the mathematics of Newtonian physics, it misses the most essential features characterizing human social dynamics, i.e. its complexity

Alarm. The evolutionary jump of global political economy needed

This paper is a reaction on the last four global crisis of the human species: the global financial crisis, the migration crisis, the climate crisis, and the corona crisis. It argues that a global crisis needs a revolution in global governance necessitating a global change of the mode of production. In part 1 essential features - a vision - of a world we want to live in are proposed, while in part 2 an update of the dynamics of global class structures is used to identify coalitions for the global revolution needed to get closer to that vision

New Combinations :Taking Schumpeter's concept serious

Schumpeter’s idea that innovations can be described as new combinations often is understood as a mere metaphor and slight generalization of what he considers as the characterizing feature of entrepreneurship. The main argument of this paper is that more and deeper issues are involved in the concept of new combinations than is commonly understood. Moreover, a proper understanding of these issues would not only enhance our knowledge about observed innovation processes in economic life, it might reveal several properties common to creative processes in general