Recent Evolutionary Theorizing About Economic Change

Zusammenfassung

This famous passage from Marshall’s Principles of Economics (it first appeared in the fifth edition which came out in 1907) nicely brings out two issues, which are as germane to economics today as they were when Marshall wrote. The first is the heavy reliance by economists in their formal theorizing on the notion of “equilibrium”. The other is the appeal that “biological conceptions3x201D; have for many economists, particularly when their focus is on economic change.

The Mecca of the economics lies in economic biology… But biological conceptions are more complex than those of mechanics; a volume on Foundations must therefore give a relatively large place to mechanical analogies, and frequent use is made of the term equilibrium which suggests something of a static analogy. (Marshall 1948).

Mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Verlages und des Autors übernommen aus demJournalof Economic Literature XXXIII, 1995, S. 48–90.