SaintElsewhere Posted February 21, 2013 Posted February 21, 2013 This is an avenue I feel is really under explored. The natural world should be our mirror for economics. The calorie is the economic unit of the natural world. Competition has produced all life on this planet. The natural world is a sort of free market of genes. Thoughts? Examples? I will be bringing some of my own later.
SaintElsewhere Posted February 23, 2013 Author Posted February 23, 2013 Ok, let's just look at parasitic relationships in Biology. Most parasitic relationships eventually become symbiotic over time. Just as diseases have a tendency to evolve to become less deadly. A disease that kills its host has less time to transmit to a new host. This provides the incentive for the bacteria to adapt. Some bacteria adapt to the point where they begin to provide useful services to the host, such as E coli which produces vitamin K and kills off other pathogenic bacteria. Other types of parasitic relationships become less parasitic because even those that don't kill the host stress it. The incentives of each species begin to align and you have symbiosis. James Lovelock and some of his students did a lot of work in this area, they were the first to propose that mitochondria were at one point free living proteobacteria that merged with other bacteria to create the eukaryotic cell. Economics and Evolution are all about analyzing incentives.
Tate Posted February 24, 2013 Posted February 24, 2013 IDK, I feel like the analogy can only go so far. For example, with economic progress there are many people who are alive today that wouldn't have been able to survive in centuries past. Agricultural methods have improved such that there is much more output per acre and so land that would have had to have been used to produce food to sustain today's population is freed up for other uses. Thus, "weaker" people (such as myself, probably) are able to survive largely based on the technological advancements and capital accumulation of others. But it definitely is interesting that there are examples in nature of utility-maximizing behavior being mutually beneficial.
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