Nov

25

Origin of WealthThe Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker applies insights from chaos theory and evolution to answer big questions relating to how the world of wealth works. It takes the most popular studies from the Santa Fe Institute, pounds some insights from the popular exegeses of evolution such as those of Dawkins and Ridley and extends the work to how to run and finance a company and an economy.

Chapter 1 covers the economic history of the world, the relative stability through thousands of years, and then the explosion the last 200, and how it was created without planning by the principal ingredients of evolution: differentiation, selection, and replication. He notes that no one could understand how to produce and distribute all the material goods of the world, considers this complex, and then suggests that the implications of chaos theory must be used to understand this complexity.

Chapter 2 describes classical economics emphasizing the limitations of its principal assumptions of perfect information, perfect competition, its trajectory to a balance point with Pareto optimality based on insights of Adam Smith relating to the invisible hand and the division of labor, and the concepts of diminishing marginal utility and diminishing marginal productivity of Bentham and Turgot. These ideas, according to Beinhocker, provide a very shaky foundation.

Chapter 3 narrates a meeting of economists and physicists at Santa Fe where the physicists questioned some of the assumptions of classical economists, and contains various anecdotes and partial summaries of data that show the actual world is unpredictable, and discusses the laws of thermodynamics and suggests they have some insights for the dynamic nature of economies.

Chapter 4 discusses the major principles of complexity economics, dynamism, agents, networks, emergence and evolution that Beinhocker says are necessary to understand the actual economy.

Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 contain charts that are the output of various games and models, and selected empirical studies from work in the field of dynamic systems, agents, networks, and emergent tendencies that are culled from work at Santa Fe Institute by its contributors and heroes. Included are oscillation charts from the beer game, attendance charts at a favorite Santa Fe bar, diagrams of the number of connections as the nodes in a network increase, price charts from Mandelbrot that show price changes from a random walk that are not exactly identical to the daily prices changes of IBM between 1959 and 1996, and a power law fit to the number of earthquakes in Southern California. 

Chapter 9 compares the process of evolution to a contest for building with Lego blocks, with the good designs winning out over the bad designs, copying of the good designs, good tricks, path dependence, and forced moves. Three dimensional charts of fitness diagrams of Dennett are given to show that jumps from one fitness path to another are easy.

Chapter 10 shows how game theory, prisoner's dilemma games, and the game of life are helpful in understanding the distribution of wealth in an economy. The rest of the book applies these principles to the physical and social technologies, and business plans, that develop these design in the real economy, with particular applications to managing a company and the ideal political system which, according to Beinhocker, is a mixed economy with government choosing the best business plans for evolution to work on.

I found the chapter on business strategy very insightful. It suggests that the ideal business organization is one that combines flexibility with rigidity, gray hairs with young turks, sensitive antennae to follow the market, and ability to swarm on any areas that have temporary profit advantage. It emphasizes the importance of uncertainty, the transitory nature of business advantage, shows that one must be prepared with a wide variety of game plans for success due to the uncertainties and ephemera, gives some excellent examples of companies that were once leaders that fell down the wayside, like the British East India Company , that in the seventeenth century "monopolized trade in four counties, had worldwide interests in all essential commodities, had its own private army and navy, could declare war when it's business interests were threatened, and effectively ruled over a fifth of the world's populations". It went out of business in 1873. It also contains an insightful discussion of how Microsoft and Dell were able to start from virtually zero and become bigger than IBM in a few years by applying these principles. The main point of the physical technology chapter is that an S shaped growth curve naturally follows from evolution but that disruptive technologies can push you off the curve. There is a nice discussion of how the scientific revolution led to the enhanced growth of physical technologies starting with the 18th century. The main point of the social technology chapter is that the heterogeneity of people combined with the division of labor and increasing returns to scale makes transactions between individuals non-zero sum in a market economy. Beinhocker claims that we inherit an inclination to cooperate for mutual gain as well as an urge to compete.

The weakest chapter in the book is the application of these principles to finance. It contains various charts showing that a model of stock market decision making can lead to price distributions that look like real prices in some respects, and has two charts that show how proprietary methods developed by Farmer could retrospectively identify areas that apparently have some visual differences from those that would be generated by random charts. It has some haphazard and undocumented charts of that according to its author Farmer, are different from those that would appear if there were perfect arbitrage between fundamental and technical traders. The results are not predictive and not in any way differentiable from thousands of other equally plausible models, and selected anecdotal charts. It also attempts to apply the complexity principles to show that the work relating the degree of market sensitivity of a company to the cost of capital is flawed and non-descriptive in many cases.

The chapter on politics and policy is one of the weakest chapters that I have ever read in a book. There is a discussion of contrived studies that show that people wont accept 1% as a fair share of a bargain even if they are bettered by it if the other side is getting 99%. From this, he concludes that people need to feel reciprocal equities to be happy. He relates this to some of the original studies that show that corporate formation is based on increasing trust and then calls for government to intervene to create equity and trust. The chapter contains a litany of complaints about the economy as it exists, for example the distribution of wealth, the relation of parents and childrens income. No attention is paid to the work of Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve or Banfield or the numerous follow ups showing the relation between incentives, intelligence, achievement, and the relative contributions of heredity versus environment. Nor is any attention paid to the fairness of redistribution after the fact, or what the impact on incentives of such programs might be. Beinhocker suggests that solution to the form of government is contained in complexity economics and that this shows that institutional structures combined with individual experimentation is the source of wealth. No attention is given to the influence of incentives, or the ability to keep what you produce that is the lynchpin of all the business plans that make up the fitness landscape.

The book is deeply flawed. There is no recognition that the very preliminary and rudimentary results of models based on complexity have much less correspondence to the bulk of economic activity then the models he would replace. Time and time again, he refers to charts that complexity models build up and notes some visual similarity to some aspect of economic activity without comparing the descriptive or predictive accuracy, or relevance of the models to alternative models. The studies of corporate growth that he relies on are not adjusted for survivor bias nor do the studies that show that most firms are not the same as 100 years ago take account of acquisitions or liquidations and the returns therefrom. As mentioned, the work on finance is completely anecdotal and non-predictive and reads almost like a prospectus for funding for the chaos institute rather than an attempt to advance knowledge.

And yet, despite its flaws, I found the ideas of the book very thought provoking. And I learned much from the chapters on management and venture capital where Beinhocker previously worked and writes with considerable insight about, and I enjoyed the wide range of examples that he cites from his wide travels around the world and his intimate acquaintance with the many big companies that he must have consulted for.

I would highly recommend this book to augment one's knowledge of how evolution can be applied to the field of economics.


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