The economics of utopia: a co-evolutionary model of ideas, citizenship and socio-political change

The competition and evolution of ideas in the public sphere: a new foundation for institutional theory

“…We now have a vision of the microdynamics of the process of institutional evolution by the evolution and competition of ideas in the public sphere from which we may derive a macroscopic view of the process of institutional evolution. This view is essentially one which fuses the view of the competition of ‘utopias’ offered by Almudi et al (2017a, 2017b) with the view of the Brisbane School of evolutionary/institutional economics (Dopfer, 2012; Dopfer et al , 2004; Dopfer and Potts, 2008), incorporates the concept of demes introduced by Hartley and Potts (2014) and extends the whole to offer a formal vision of the process of cultural evolution as evoked by Hayek (1988).…”

“…Those institutions may still guide thought but only as a subset of the new, or in an inert fashion with respect to their influence on behaviour. This movement is what is studied by Almudi et al (2017a, 2017b), and the flow factor they define is now given microfoundations in the fitness of the ideas espoused by the deme .…”

“…The catalyst for this proposition is the contributions of Almudi et al (2017a, 2017b). Their idea, inspired by the work of Mancur Olson (1965), is that it is valuable for economics to seek an understanding of how ‘utopias’ compete in the public sphere through the efforts of individuals to communicate and promote them.…”

“…We then consider the manner in which institutions evolve with respect to an individual person, and how they may be communicated as ideas in the public sphere that compete for adoption as institutions, and fade into insignificance as they become irrelevant. We then shift perspective from the microdynamics of the evolution and competition of ideas and use this to inform a macroscopic view of institutional evolution and the emergence of demes , which extends the Brisbane School theory of evolutionary/institutional economics and fuses it with the vision that Almudi et al (2017a) provide of the competition of utopias. We conclude by considering how this provides us a valuable new foundation for institutional theory.…”

Exploring the Dedicated Knowledge Base of a Transformation towards a Sustainable Bioeconomy

“…This means, for example, that both subject rules that shape the sustainability goals of the individual carriers (for example, what they consider good or bad) and object rules that determine what is legitimate and important within a social system or IS are subject to path dependence, competition, and feedback at the level of the underlying ideas (e.g., [58,131,150,151]). The diffusion of normative knowledge about the desired states of a system is therefore always contingent on its context specificity and dependent on cultural evolution.…”