The coevolution of everything, everywhere, all at once: institutions, culture, and the great enrichment

Bernardo Mueller

Chapter 7 in Handbook on Institutions and Complexity, 2025, pp 126-157 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Although institutions are humanly devised, they are also emergent phenomena that cannot be closely controlled or predicted. In addition, institutions emerge in a coupled coevolutionary dynamic with culture, as well as other evolving systems such as technology, geography, and language. The coevolution of culture and institutions, which is the focus of this chapter, means that changes in culture alter the fitness of the current designs of institutions, which leads to changes in institutions, which in turn feeds back to alter the fitness of current culture in unpredictable coevolutionary dynamics. I model this process using coupled fitness landscapes and Boolean hypercubes to show how coevolutionary processes cannot be foretold or fine-tuned, as they exhibit sensitivity to initial conditions, path dependence, non-optimality, multiple equilibria, instability, uncertainty, mismatch, and non-ergodicity. The chapter explores how human ultrasociality and the collective brain play a role in this coevolutionary process. As an example, the chapter explores the Great Enrichment – the rise of modern economic growth – through the coevolution of institutions – such as the Western Church's Family and Marriage Program, the Republic of Letters, impersonal markets – and culture – such as individualism, belief in useful knowledge, and impersonal prosociality. This analysis highlights the contingent and emergent nature of long-term economic history.

Keywords: Coevolution; Institutions; Culture; Economic growth; Complexity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035309719
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