Paul Krugman on the ecological nature of successful industrial economies

The New York Times “Jobs, Jobs and Cars”

What does Paul Krugman know about ecology and evolution? Maybe not a lot, but unlike most appropriations of the ecology metaphor, this one gets things really right: Krugman is correct to suggest that the success of a particular business (or businessperson) depends more on the overall industrial system in which that business operates than on the particular merits of that particular business. Distilling success down to the actions of individuals additively scaled up just does not make sense: at multiple levels it is the emergent qualities of interacting individuals, businesses, and regions, and countries that determine whether every person and institution that comprise the larger entity succeed. It is not that the little guy or the little business do not matter: to be successful, you need excellence at this smaller scale. But there also has to be coherence at the larger scale, coordination and cooperation between the components of the larger system. Both scales matter.

Evolutionary biologists, in particular those enamored of gene-centric (or even population-centric) perspectives on the evolutionary process, would do well to observe the dynamics of human economic systems. The myth of the invisible hand and the myth of the selfish gene are equally and analogously tempting, because they portray a world that would be far easier to understand than the actual non-additive, multilevel world in which we turn out to live.