Somehow my (new last term!) ethics course was undersubscribed this semester, and I heard about another course, at Hertie School, Geo-Economic & High-Tech Competition. I'd only just started realising that geoeconomics was a field having attend an excellent meeting about it in the German Ministry of Economics last Autumn, and it seemed entirely evident that it was hugely important to understanding how power was flowing around and through AI products and corporations. The professor, Mauro Gilli, proved to be one of our adjuncts, and also to be very willing to have me attend. I'm learning a lot, and this isn't the most important of it, but it was something I needed to write down.
Mauro asked yesterday whether anyone had heard of punctuated equilibria, and no one held up their hand, so I did, and was surprised to get called on, and more surprised to bottle out. I suddenly realised that I only knew the term from biology, and had no idea how it applied to economics, so only managed to blurt out that it was to do with varied rates of change.
Punctuated equilibria in biology
If you have a naive understanding of Darwinian Evolution, you might expect that it should lead to a reduction in diversity since "survival of the fittest" is a selective force. In fact, you don't have to be that naive. When I was the Hans Przibram Fellow at The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, I met full professors of biology that had trouble with this. However, Darwin's theory was one for explaining the increase of diversity, the number of species that the Earth had achieved in what was then thought to be only a few million years of its existence. Apparently some of Darwin's friends also saw that diversity was both critical to yet threatened by his theory, and suggested in letters that he give God the job of increasing diversity, to reconnect to the Church. But Darwin saw that evolution must itself select for maintaining diversity, because diversity is necessary for change, and a capacity for change is necessary for resilience.
Anyway, Darwin's understanding of change apparently came from 19C theories of geology, which assumed somehow that change was slow and constant, like growth of a tree. Returning to that naive view of evolution, you might think that at any point in time some species are out their walloping others, but in fact to a first approximation we can assume that everything alive now is roughly equally well adapted to the present circumstances. That is, the species are more or less at an equilibrium.
Sometimes though that equilibrium gets disrupted, whether by a climactic event (e.g. asteroids) or by an innovation that really does allow some individuals and then species a big advantage. Then there is a period of rapid change until everything else settles down.
I'm honestly not sure whether in biology punctuated equilibria are meant to extend to die outs like asteroids, or only "increases in progress" such as the innovations of eusociality or language, or maybe some other thing that drives sudden speciation. Last I knew, people were still very confused about why regions that look very similar e.g. the glacial lakes of Scandinavia and Minnesota have very different extents of speciation in them. What progress even means in the context of evolution is ambiguous. The big question when I was at the KLI was whether there was something like evolvability that was evolving – did life recover and diversify faster after more recent crises?
Personally, I suspect it does. Genomes seem to "compile" good tricks into low-bit representations that facilitate certain kinds of innovation that have proved useful in the past, but to use very dense, high-bit representations for "essential infrastructure" for the embryo during its (incredibly tricky!) developmental phase. I suspect the same might be true of ecosystems, where "compiling" gets done by species. But I might be biased, as a member of a generalist species.
Periods of rapid growth in economics
After I blathered, Mauro drew a growth graph with a few steep phases to illustrate punctuated equilibria in the context of geoeconomics. But what can that mean? Growth for what or whom? Actually, the global economy – and also the biosphere – are almost continuously growing. Both are non-zero sum. We really did start out as rock in space, and now we have increasing life and economies.
But here again I'm not sure about what breaks the equilibria. Wars disrupt it, but they don't tend to build the economy, only reduce it. Periods of high inequality tend also to be highly creative, but again tend to lead to war and collapse. There was a huge period of innovation in high tech when the AT&T patents got "liberated" by the US as an attempted antitrust effort in the 1950s. The US didn't want to break up a company that had really helped during WWII, but they also didn't want it to have monopoly powers. The release of its IP was seen at the time as a failure because no other phone companies were able to invade that market, but now is seen in retrospect as having triggered enormous innovation, among other things in transistors and silicon chips.
Maybe there's nothing more to it than what I have just said, but I'm just thinking aloud to share with Mauro, but also with you :-) But now I need to get back to some other work...
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| The non-zero-sumness of the world's economy. Note that the US economy is increasing, yet becoming a decreasing part of the global GDP. This is because the liberal project is presently a success, we are getting better and better at empowering individuals globally. Yay! Though see also geopolitical events. Click through for source. |
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