Introduction to Evolutionary Economics and the Invisible Hand
Adam Smith (1759) introduced the concept of the invisible hand. He proposed that, according to the metaphor of the invisible hand, the purpose of self-interest significantly benefits the “common good.” Smith believed the “desire of men is to be respected by the community members in which they live, and men desire to feel that they are honorable beings.”
While Adam Smith introduced the concept of the invisible hand to explain how self-interest can unintentionally promote the common good, evolutionary economics builds on this foundation by applying principles of natural selection and adaptation to understand economic behaviors and societal evolution. This perspective offers insights into how economies evolve, reflecting both competitive and cooperative interactions within and between groups.
Biglan (2020) warned us, “American culture has shifted from values that emphasize the well-being of our communities to the ethos of wealth accumulation above all other values.” These are the unintended consequences of the “invisible hand” in economics. In his book, (Rebooting Capitalism: How We Can Forge a Society that Works for Everyone, 2020) Biglan proposed, “How we can forge a society that works for everyone.” He presents the scientific basis for initiating an evolutionary process to “reboot capitalism” so that a culture evolves to benefit all. He encourages us that, “intentional and well-organized efforts to bring about change in American society can succeed.” He pointed us toward engaging in collaborative behavior to evolve a more nurturing and equitable business culture. While Biglan warns of the pitfalls of unchecked capitalism, evolutionary scientists like David Sloan Wilson offer insights into how evolutionary principles can inform and transform our understanding of economic and social systems.
Evolutionary Perspectives on Business and Management
David Sloan Wilson is the president of the Evolution Institute as well as the editor-in-chief of This View of Life magazine. A 2017 edition featured a contribution by a dozen scientists addressing This View of Business: How Evolutionary Thinking Can Transform the Workplace (2017). Van Vught, Wilson, and Beilby noted, “Rethinking business and management from an evolutionary perspective can have profound implications at all scales, from the well-being of individual employees to the performance of firms, to the creation of a sustainable global economy.” In the same edition, Wilson proposes that Multilevel Selection (MLS) theory “makes it crystal clear that unless competition is appropriately structured and refereed, it can do more harm than good.”
Wilson, Van Vugt, and O” Gorman (2008) noted that methodological individualism has historically dominated most research in psychology and evolution. However, “natural selection is now known to operate at multiple levels of the biological hierarchy.” They concluded, “When between-group selection dominates within-group selection, a major evolutionary transition occurs, and the group becomes a new, higher-level organism. Human evolution likely represents a major transition, and this has wide-ranging implications for the psychological study of group behavior, cognition, and culture.” This concept is that of a group that behaves, with some variation, in unison like a single individual.
Bridging Disciplines: Sociobiology and Radical Behaviorism
Naour (2009) published his book E.O, Wilson and B. F. Skinner: A Dialogue Between Sociobiology and Radical Behaviorism based on a conversation between these accomplished Harvard professors in 1987. Naour was given the recordings by Wilson in 1995. According to Naour, Wilson “learned of my early graduate work based in radical behaviorism and later work based in evolutionary psychology. The serendipitous result of our early relationship was his understanding that my background and interest might enable me to identify a unifying thread in the Skinner-Wilson conversation.” Wilson encouraged Naour “to do something with this someday.” The result is this outstanding treatise attempting to integrate radical behaviorism and sociobiology.
Naour notes, “What Skinner failed to conceptually advance was the proposition that his mechanism of operant conditioning could be essential to describing the biological evolution of culture, thus providing the seamless linkage among the three kinds of selection by consequences. Additionally, his neglect of the vigorous discussions regarding multilevel selection theory and group selection that unfolded in the 1960s caused him to be inattentive to a serious consideration of how his conception of three kinds of selection by consequences might be aligned with multilevel selection and group selection.” He concluded, “Skinner’s inability to adequately resolve these concepts in no way diminishes the magnitude of his work: rather, time simply ran out.” Skinner died on August 18, 1990, three years after the conversation with E.O. Wilson. This blending of sociobiology and radical behaviorism by Wilson and Skinner sets the stage for a deeper understanding of human behavior and culture through the lens of evolutionary principles, as further explored by David Sloan Wilson.
David Sloan Wilson reviewed Naour’s book for the publisher at the time of publication. In his review, Wilson wrote, “E.O. Wilson and B.F. Skinner agreed that the human capacity for change is both a product of genetic evolution and an evolutionary process. Yet, sociology and radical behaviorism paradigms went in vastly different directions.” As E.O. Wilson has advocated, the consilience of biology and the science of behavior is at hand.
Applying Evolutionary Theory to Enhance Workplace Practices
Pfeffer's research complements this evolutionary perspective by demonstrating the practical implications of these principles in the business world. Pfeffer (1998) documents that by valuing and taking care of their employees, businesses can be profitable. Pfeffer concluded from his research that businesses that placed a high value on employees, like sharing profits, had a much higher survival rate over five years than businesses that treated their employees as expendable. This demonstrates that the greatest asset a business has is its people. That is our goal - building social capital by working together for the common good.
Global Quality of Life and the American Societal Model
The social scientists, Wilkinson and Pickett (2011) evaluated many socioeconomic and quality-of-life measures to identify the ability of many industrialized countries to provide a culture conducive to a high quality of life. The Nordic countries, along with Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands came to the top. England, Portugal, and the United States came at the bottom. The United States was noted to be an outlier in both income distribution/inequality as well as health and social problems of its citizens. They concluded, “The United States of America is doing a poor job regulating itself as a corporate unit,” A tragic and graphic example is how we have handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cultural Shifts and Technological Innovations
Environmental change can trigger rapid individual behavior change and more clearly cultural evolutionary change. Putnam and Garrett (The Upswing, 2020) document the significant cultural changes in America in the 1960s and 1970s, They describe these changes as a turning point and the “hinge” of the twentieth century. These changes were visible to those of us who lived through it. The United States changed dramatically in a few years. It also started the process of change in the work environment, now significantly influenced by the drastic technological innovations such as artificial intelligence as well as working remotely that have changed so drastically the work setting landscape. More and more of us are working in isolation. Is that work environment promoting building social and human capital? What is it doing to our mental health?
Putnam and Garrett (2020) documented cultural changes in that period. They described the changes in the culture driven by the behavior at the time as “the turning point” that they define as “the direction of change, not immediately the level” of change for the turn from We to I/Me. This cultural evolution is ongoing. It is happening in an insidious and unguided process. Our collective behavior is driving these changes and we have continued to evolve in the direction of increased emphasis on I/Me. If we do not intentionally change the course of these cultural changes, they will continue, and get worse (see our posting of Dark Age Ahead: Jane Jacob’s Predictions).
Challenges and Opportunities in the Modern Work Environment
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these changes. The structure, consequences, and contingencies that shape and maintain our behavior have radically changed, again. It has had devastating social, educational, health, and economic problems. And many other individual and global effects on us that most likely will continue to unfold for years. It has most drastically changed the way we live and work. Everywhere we look, we find something said or written about the future of work. The environment of work and how we work has been disrupted.
We propose that this disruptive event creates an opportunity to build a Total Worker Health (TWH) environment as proposed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). TWH provides a solid framework for cultural change in the work environment that, through continuing research, is building an evidence-based foundation. This foundation promotes resilience, flexibility, safety, health, and well-being as well as personal and cultural growth in the accelerated future of work. This will require working together for the greater good. This is not the time to rush into making changes in the work environment without considering and evaluating the short, and long-term consequences. We tend to do that in our policy-making. Will remote work lead to more isolation and “Bowling Alone”? Can we collaborate online effectively? How do we resolve conflict when even with Zoom we do not have all the non-verbal cues needed to read each other virtually? How do we socially reward each other? Because we are social animals, what does working alone do to our brains with fewer in-person interactions? These are a few of the many questions to which we do not currently have answers. Do we look to social media or science for answers? The theoretical insights provided by Smith, Wilson, and others into the nature of social systems and evolution find practical application in efforts like the NIOSH Future of Work Initiative, which aims to adapt our work environments to foster health, well-being, and social capital in the face of contemporary challenges
The NIOSH Future of Work Initiative
NIOSH, as a component of the TWH initiative to reinforce collaboration among a wide range of organizational policies, programs, and practices, launched the Future of Work Initiative in 2019. This work was ongoing before the onset of the pandemic. The best source of scientific and evidence-based information regarding NIOSH, TWH, and the Future of Work Initiative is found on the NIOSH website. There, they also provided a list of peer-reviewed scientific articles that provide a framework for further research and implementation.
The Future of Work Initiative set a few priorities addressing issues that impact the workplace, work, and workforce. Tamers and Howard delineated the challenges and opportunities presented by the Future of Work Initiative in the NIOSH Science Blog (September 25, 2020). Their approach is quite comprehensive and science-based. It can guide us to create opportunities for making a real healthy change in the culture of work that lasts and becomes sustainable. The primary focus is to build social capital.
To harness the potential of evolutionary economics for societal improvement, we must focus on fostering social capital through inclusive and collaborative workplace practices. The NIOSH Future of Work Initiative provides a science-based framework for achieving this, emphasizing the importance of resilience, flexibility, and collective well-being. By prioritizing social capital and leveraging evolutionary insights, we can design economic and social systems that promote the common good in an ever-evolving world.
The Importance of Social Capital in the Workplace
Portes (1998) provided us with a comprehensive review of the origins and definitions of social capital. He expressed concerns that it was losing any distinct meaning because the term was so widely used. He noted that the heuristic power of the concept was derived first by focusing on the positive consequences of sociability, and then by calling attention to how such non-monetary forms of capital can be such an important source of influence. He reinforced the role of social capital in the creation of human capital.
Putnam (2000) frames social capital as an engine of civic engagement and a broad measure of the health of the commons. He defines social capital not as the sole possession of an individual but as an attribute of the group members. Developing norms for expectations and actions and building trust and collaboration produces social capital leading to collective action.
According to Putnam, there are two types of social capital:
Bonding social capital: the value assigned to social networks between homogenous groups of people.
Bridging social capital: the value assigned to social networks between socially heterogeneous groups.
Putnam concludes by noting, “Much of the evidence I have presented suggests that social capital at various levels is mutually reinforcing - that those who reach out to friends and family are often the most active in community outreach as well. But this is by no means always the case…Some kinds of bonding social capital may discourage the formation of bridging social capital and vice versa.” He observed that “bridging and bonding social capital are good for different things…. From a collective point of view, the scope of the social capital we need depends on the scale of the problem we face.” In evolutionary terms, a diverse and inclusive culture is created from “individual to within a small group to between groups of groups” along the multilevel selection process previously discussed. This emphasizes the need for creating a work culture that is diverse but also inclusive, built on respect and collaboration.
Pass it on and see you soon!