What is Evolutionary Economics?

I have not heard of Evolutionary Economics? It is not surprising. This is a new discipline that we in the biological evolution and the forces that shape to see our economic decisions. It is behavioral economics, another discipline who have not hecheap nfl jerseysard much connected. The behavioral perspective is to describe what we do, while the evolutionary perspective to know why we do hypothesis. For example, consider an experiment that economists call the Ultimatum Game . Usually played with two questions.



The couple gave $ 100 to split between them. The first player is allowed to propose the allocation of money. It is suggested that he get to $ 75, for example, while the other player gets $ 25. What he proposes, the second player can say yes or no, and then everyone will get their share by or you can not say In this case you do not receive a penny.


Now, if you understood what was just explained, you can see that rationally, player two should always say yes. After all, even if the split proposed is $95 and $5, the $5 is still better than nothing, right? Financially speaking, there is nothing to be gained by saying no (it should be noted that players know they won't be playing again, so a reputation for turning down a low proposal buys them nothing).

What actually happens. People mostly accept what are considered "reasonable" proposals, the obvious one being a 50/50 split. We would probably all expect this. On the other hand, despite getting no money at all for their refusal, most players turn down proposals that give them less than 30% of the money.

Why is that? The explanation many give is simply that it isn't fair. Evolutionary economics hypothesizes that we have a built-in sense of "reciprocal altrubuffalo bills jerseys.ism," which evolved over tens of thousands of years, and this emotional reaction demands fairness. There must have been some advantage to the human species to maintain this "justice," even at the expense of personal gain.

Monkey Economics

Interestingly, even chimpanzees and monkeys share this sense of fairness. For example, in one experiment at Emory University, when two primates participate in a mutual task for which one is rewarded, the second one will stop helping out in future tasks if the first does not share the rewards fairly.

Interestingly, they also share with humans the extreme and seemingly irrational tendency to hurt their own self interest in order to protest injustice. For example, capuchin monkeys were trained to trade a stone for a cucumber slice, a worthwhile exchange from their perspective, given the usual 95% cooperation when the cucumber was offered. But when a second monkey was seen to be given a grape - which is more highly valued - the monkey getting the cucumber slice didn't exchange so often. The cooperation rate dropped to 60%, and the monkeys sometimes simply refused to take the slice at all. They would actually go hungry rather than be "taken advantage of" in an unfair trade.

Apparently all primates including us have evolved a emotional feeling of justice. Perhaps it helped maintain harmony in the small groups we lived in thousands of years ago. This is the common evolutionary view. Of course, why don't hundreds of millions of modern workers refuse to work for a living while others make ten times more for the same effort? Perhaps it is a matter of proximity (most low wage workers are around others who make the same low wages). Or it might seem just too irrational to starve for a feeling of fairness.

On the other hand, it is quite likely that in addition to the irrational responses to the "Ultimatum Game," we can identify many self-defeating economic behaviors that people regnfl jerseysularly engage in. They result from the hard-wiring of our brains, according to the theories of evolutionary economics. Fortunately, our "software" or conscious mind can evolve more quickly.