One Analogy Can Hide Another: Physics and Biology in Alchian’s “Economic Natural Selection”

Clément Levallois

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: Today, Alchian's "Uncertainty, evolution and economic theory" (1950) is hailed by evolutionary economists as a most important piece, which resumed an evolutionary brand of theorizing in economics after the eclipse of the interwar period. On the other hand, Alchian's article is also cherished by standard economists who consider it to be a powerful defense of the maximization principle in the theory of the firm. Our examination of the early intellectual life of Alchian shows that it was his involvement in military systems analysis at the Rand Corporation that led him to reckon that uncertainty was a fundamental obstacle to marginal analysis. We then demonstrate that Alchian's economic natural selection is a statistical argument which, if phrased in biological parlance, owes its logic to statistical mechanics. This invites to reconsider the strong opposition usually made between evolutionist and mechanist modes of thinking.

Keywords: Armen A. Alchian; Rand Corporation; Ronald A. Fisher; evolutionary economics; statistical mechanics; theory of the firm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 B25 B31 B41 C44 D21 D40 M M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-12-15
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/14278/ERS-2008-083-MKT.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureri:14278

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).