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Perspectives on Economic and Ecologic Evolution

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Complex Evolutionary Dynamics in Urban-Regional and Ecologic-Economic Systems

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Abstract

The connection between economics and ecology1 runs much deeper than the identical first two syllables of their respective names. Theories of evolution for each have directly and indirectly influenced each other for a long time in a symbiotic pattern. Both fields have shared a division between those theories of evolution emphasizing a gradualist continuity and those emphasizing a punctuationist discontinuity. We shall see how views on this division have moved between economics and ecology in an extended dialogue.

This natural inequality of the two powers of population, and of population in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all nature.

Thomas Robert Malthus (1798, Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 16).

Man is to a considerable degree the artificer of his own fortune. We can apply our reflections and our ingenuity to the remedy of whatever we regret

William Godwin (1820, On Population, p. 615)

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  1. Department of Economics, James Madison University, South Main St. 800, Harrisonburg, VA, 22807, USA

    J. Barkley Rosser

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Rosser, J.B. (2011). Perspectives on Economic and Ecologic Evolution. In: Complex Evolutionary Dynamics in Urban-Regional and Ecologic-Economic Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8828-7_6

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