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Evolutionary Economics and Creative Destruction
The central theme of this book is competition treated as an evolutionary process in which the focus is upon economic change and not economic equilibrium.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 1998
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September 26, 2018
I read this book because I was looking for more on Schumpeter's ideas of creative destruction. (Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy only has a few pages on the subject, surrounded by unpersuasive praise of Stalinism). Unfortunately I didn't really find what I was looking for.
Most of the book is an elaboration of a mathematical model of the competition between firms in evolutionary terms. Maybe I shouldn't criticise a book if I expected something different, but there are still problems. Firstly, it's the based on lectures the author gave, and I can't help feeling that the audience deserve something less technical than what they could read in an academic paper. Secondly, the author keeps emphasising that we shouldn't be looking at equilibrium models in a dynamic economy, but his models still didn't seem dynamic enough to me - there were no examples of showing the results produced by the models over a period of time.
The last lecture was a bit different, looking at the nature of investment in science and technology, but I couldn't help feeling that it read like something from the 1960's
There were a few items of interest in the book. Fisher's Principlerelating the rate of change of a quantity with statistical moments was one. In the last chapter the discussion of the economic inefficiencies of keeping technological knowledge proprietary was worth reading. But overall it the book didn't live up to my hopes.
Most of the book is an elaboration of a mathematical model of the competition between firms in evolutionary terms. Maybe I shouldn't criticise a book if I expected something different, but there are still problems. Firstly, it's the based on lectures the author gave, and I can't help feeling that the audience deserve something less technical than what they could read in an academic paper. Secondly, the author keeps emphasising that we shouldn't be looking at equilibrium models in a dynamic economy, but his models still didn't seem dynamic enough to me - there were no examples of showing the results produced by the models over a period of time.
The last lecture was a bit different, looking at the nature of investment in science and technology, but I couldn't help feeling that it read like something from the 1960's
There were a few items of interest in the book. Fisher's Principlerelating the rate of change of a quantity with statistical moments was one. In the last chapter the discussion of the economic inefficiencies of keeping technological knowledge proprietary was worth reading. But overall it the book didn't live up to my hopes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review