The Power of Biobabble
The
invitation came, rather disappointingly, by conventional mail. Still, it
sounded enticing: "The Cato Institute and the Bionomics Institute invite you to
Now What? Living With Perpetual Evolution , the fifth annual Bionomics
Conference." Leading the list of speakers for the Nov. 13-15 conference was
Gregory Benford, one of my favorite science-fiction writers. And at the top of
the card was a stirring quotation from Bionomics Institute founder Michael
Rothschild:
Like a deep-sea volcano
bursting to the surface, spewing out vast new lands soon to be inhabited by a
complex ecosystem, the Web is creating a virtual landscape that will soon be
occupied by an awesome array of economic organisms. ... It's evolution at warp
speed. Strap yourself in.
The Cato
Institute is a libertarian think tank noted mostly for its adamant opposition
to government regulation. But what on earth (or in cyberspace) is
bionomics--and why is Cato (and Forbes
ASAP , which is a
co-sponsor of the conference) promoting it?
Although you have to look at Rothschild's 1990 book,
Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem , to get the full flavor, the essential
tenets of the movement are spelled out on the Bionomics Institute home page,
which offers a primer called "Bionomics 101." The primer explains:
[A]ll traditional schools
of economics are based on the concepts of classical physics, while bionomics is
based on the principles of evolutionary biology. ... [O]rthodox economics
describes the "economy as a machine." ... Instead, bionomics says that an
economy is like an "evolving ecosystem." A modern market economy is like a
tropical rainforest.
Sounds
good, doesn't it? Bionomics has won converts not only at the Cato Institute but
also among a wide variety of influential people ranging from Newt Gingrich to
Clyde Prestowitz. ( Fortune has described it as "a policymakers' version
of The Celestine Prophecy .") And Rothschild is certainly a bright,
energetic fellow. There are, however, two big weaknesses in his thinking: He
doesn't know much about economics, and he doesn't know much about evolution.
When I say that Rothschild doesn't know much about economics, I don't mean that
conventional economics is right and his ideas are wrong--although where they
differ that is generally true. I mean that his description of what conventional
economics is all about bears no relation to what actual economists believe or
say.
Take, for starters, his assertion that
"orthodox economics describes the 'economy as a machine.' " You might presume
from his use of quotation marks that this is something an actual economist
said, or at least that it was the sort of thing that economists routinely say.
But no economist I know thinks of the economy as being anything like a
machine--or believes, as Rothschild asserts a bit later, that because the
economy is like a machine, it is possible to make precise predictions. (In
fact, it was economists who came up with the famed "random walk" hypothesis
about stock prices, which says that they are inherently
unpredictable.)
It gets
better. Rothschild tells us, "I know this is hard for non-economists to
believe, but orthodox economics essentially ignores technological change." That
is even harder for economists to believe. In fact, I don't know how I'm going
to break the news to the guy in the next office. You see, poor Bob Solow is
under the impression that he got the Nobel Prize for his work on technological
change, in particular for his demonstration that technology, not capital
accumulation, historically has been the main driving force in economic growth.
On a different subject, it's going to be a shock to environmental
economists--who have spent decades arguing that one good way to control
pollution is to create a market in emission permits--to learn that this is an
idea unique to bionomics and totally at odds with orthodox economic thinking.
And I'm not feeling too good myself: Rothschild insists that conventional
economics depends on the assumption of diminishing returns and that, as a
result, economists have completely ignored the possibility of increasing
returns. Does this mean I have to give back that medal the American Economic
Association gave me for my work on increasing returns and international
trade?
Well, all this is more or less the usual. Whenever a
manifesto about economics contains a sentence that begins, "Orthodox economics
assumes that ..." it almost always completes that sentence with something
strange and unfamiliar. In just the last two years, I've learned that I believe
that gross domestic product is the sole measure of economic welfare, that
growth at more than 2.5 percent always causes inflation, and that sudden
speculative attacks on currencies can't happen. I've also learned that the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences keeps going to supply-siders--or
should that be Marxists?
What is
surprising, however, is that a man who proposes to replace what he imagines to
be the mechanistic worldview of conventional economics with a new view based on
evolutionary biology should know so little about the discipline that supposedly
inspires him.
Rothschild's lack of familiarity with
evolutionary theory may not be obvious to uninformed readers--his book bristles
with ostentatious footnotes and seemingly learned references. It happens,
however, that I am an evolution groupie. I started as a fan of great
popularizers like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, and I have since graduated
not only to hero worship of the leading evolutionary theorists but also to
reading textbooks and even journal articles. And so when I picked up a copy of
Bionomics , the first thing I did was check out the author's treatment of
my heroes and of what I knew to have been the important . His record was
perfect: Not one of the right people was mentioned, not one of the key
developments discussed. The bionomics version of what evolutionary theory is
about has as little to do with the real thing as its version of what economics
is about does.
What the
bionomics guys apparently think evolution is about is constant,
breathless change--strap yourself in!--change so rapid that everything is
unpredictable, that the rules themselves are constantly changing. Rothschild
seems, in particular, to view evolutionary thinking as the antithesis of
"equilibrium economics." Apparently nobody told him that equilibrium
thinking--the idea that in order to understand how individuals interact, it is
often useful to ask what would happen if each individual was doing the best he
or she could given what everyone else is doing--is almost as prevalent in . In
fact, the really funny thing is that for the most part the bionomics program
has already been implemented: Economics already is very similar to
evolutionary theory, and vice versa. However, neither field looks anything like
bionomics.
OK, enough already. The really interesting question is why
the Cato Institute and other free-market conservatives should be willing to
squander their intellectual credibility by associating their names with this
sort of thing. After all, conventional economics already has lots of nice
things to say about free markets. Why not stick with Adam Smith?
Part of
the answer, I suspect, is sociological. Traditional conservative causes like
the gold standard tend to have a musty, old-fashioned feel. They sound like the
sort of thing that appeals mainly to rich old men (and conservative think tanks
are, of course, mainly funded by rich old men). Young, vigorous conservatives
are therefore always looking for ways to seem more fashion-forward. Some of
them parade their knowledge of pop culture, some make a point of being
photographed wearing miniskirts, and some go for what we might call the
Wired style of economic rhetoric--the continual assertion that things
are changing! so fast! that we have to use lots! of exclamation points!!!
But there is also a more serious reason that
bionomics appeals to the free-market faithful: They find the conventional case
for laissez-faire too modest, too conditional, for their tastes. Standard
economic theory offers reasons to believe that markets are a good way to
organize economic activity. But it does not deify the market system, and it
even offers a number of fairly well-defined ways in which markets can fail, or
at least could be helped with government intervention. And that, for some
conservatives, is just not good enough.
Bionomics doesn't actually
provide any coherent argument in favor of free markets. In fact, Rothschild's
original book seems to hedge its bets: It spends a full chapter ("Japan's
Secret Weapon") explaining how government-business cooperation makes the
Japanese economy invincible (remember, the book was published in 1990). But
what the doctrine lacks in serious argument it makes up for in rhetoric. The
economy is an ecosystem, like a tropical rain forest! And what could be worse
than trying to control a tropical rain forest from the top down? You wouldn't
try to control an ecosystem, wiping out species you didn't like and
promoting ones you did, would you?
Well,
actually, you probably would. I think it's called "agriculture."
What do we learn from the willingness of extreme
free-market conservatives to associate themselves with crank doctrines like
bionomics? I think the main lesson is that their faith in free markets is just
that: a faith, which does not rest on either logic or evidence. Belief comes
first; then they look for arguments to justify that belief. And they are
therefore not too scrupulous about the quality of those arguments, or of those
who produce them.
Anyway, I guess I won't
attend the conference. I would have liked to meet Benford; but I couldn't stand
to watch the author of Great
Sky
River demeaning himself
by consorting with such disreputable company.
