From New Scientist:
Earlier this year, several dozen quiet radicals met in a boxy red building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, to plot just that. The stated aim of this Ernst Strüngmann Forum at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies was to create “a new synthesis for economics”. But the most zealous of the participants – an unlikely alliance of economists, anthropologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists – really do want to overthrow the old regime. They hope their ideas will mark the beginning of a new movement to rework economics using tools from more successful scientific disciplines. More.
Every time this stuff has been tried, millions starved. Maybe, with new methods, they will transform it to billions.
Biologist Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, another attendee in Frankfurt, thinks it is more to do with an attitude problem. Although some economists are open to new ideas, he says, the field as a whole is resistant to outside incursions. “I doubt that our forum will make any impact on this proud and superior profession,” Turchin wrote in the aftermath of the gathering.
It’s a point echoed by David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University in New York who co-chaired the meeting and in 2008 set up the Evolution Institute, a think-tank that aims to bring evolutionary thinking into policy formation. “The reluctance of the economics profession to change and the fact that the people most in need of change are also in a position of power is a big part of the problem,” says Wilson. “At what point does one stop trying to be diplomatic and adopt a rebellious stance?” More.
A “rebellious stance”? If these people get anywhere, they might soon produce rebellions all over again, for sure. This is usually where it starts to happen, just for a start:
(What Darwinist economics really looks like: “The evolutionary psychologist knows why you vote — and shop, and tip at restaurants” )
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