Picking up where Darwin left off (LIVE with David Sloan Wilson)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Classical economics argues that the economy is an equilibrium system—that for every winner there must be a loser. In this episode, author and professor David Sloan Wilson joins Nick live on stage at Town Hall Seattle to argue that economies are actually evolutionary systems—and once we shed the winner-take-all philosophy that has dominated Econ 101 classes for a century, we can change economic policy for the better. David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist, a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, and co-founder of the Evolution Institute. In addition to his latest book ‘This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution’, he has also written ‘Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society’, and ‘Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives’. Twitter: @David_S_Wilson Further reading: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246844/this-view-of-life-by-david-sloan-wilson/9781101870204/ http://evonomics.com/the-new-invisible-hand-david-sloan-wilson/ http://evonomics.com/complexity-economics-shows-us-that-laissez-faire-fail-nickhanauer/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Some of the most remarkable thinkers, economic thinkers in history, definitely
0:06.5	understood to a varying degree that evolution played a role in human
0:11.3	economies. This view of life actually does not slot into any current political position.
0:16.6	It's not left, right, center, or libertarian. From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics,
0:30.0	with Nick Hanauer, where we explore everything you wished you'd learn in Econ 101. In this episode of Pitchfork Economics, we're going to move away from an analysis of the behavior model of neoclassical economics, Homo economicists, and move towards an examination of the system.
1:01.0	And, you know, the traditional way of understanding economies for
1:06.6	economists is as closed equilibrium mechanistic systems and we now know with scientific certainty that that's not
1:16.5	what characterizes a human social system human social systems are actually open
1:22.1	complex adaptive and really best understood as
1:26.0	ecologies, forms of ecologies, and as such they are basically
1:32.4	evolutionary systems and that's why in this episode we're focused on evolution because with respect to human economies if you don't understand the dynamics of evolution you really can't
1:46.8	understand you know how a human economy certainly a market economy works and that's why today I am joined by a remarkable person and
1:57.9	old friend, the evolutionary biologist David Slo Sloan Wilson who is the distinguished
2:04.4	professor of Biological Sciences and anthropology at Binghamton University.
2:09.6	He's the co-founder of the Evolution Institute and who is the author of a variety of books,
2:15.6	including a brand new one called This View of Life, but he is among the world's leading
2:21.8	researchers on evolutionary theory and recently we did a town hall
2:28.0	teasing out some of the issues in his new book this This View of Life,
2:33.2	completing the Darwinian Revolution.
2:35.9	And OK, so here's our discussion.
2:38.5	Thank you.
2:40.1	Thank you.
	...

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