The Origin of Wealth

A growing population will increase the total wealth of a society as the amount of available labor grows. But growing wealth on a per-person basis (thus raising individual standards of living) requires increasing productivity, and increasing productivity requires specialization.

Businesses are themselves a form of design. The design of a business encompasses its strategy, organizational structure, management processes, culture, and a host of other factors. Business designs evolve over time through a process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, with the market as the ultimate arbiter of fitness. One of the majo

While economists were pursuing their vision of the economy as an equilibrium system, during the latter half of the twentieth century, physicists, chemists, and biologists became increasingly interested in systems that were far from equilibrium, that were dynamic and complex, and that never settled into a state of rest. Beginning in the 1970s, scien

Take a look out your window. No matter where you are, from the biggest industrialized city to the smallest rural village, you are surrounded by economic activity and its results. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the planet is abuzz with humans designing, organizing, manufacturing, servicing, transporting, communicating, buying, and selli

Modern efforts to understand the economy as an evolutionary system avoid such metaphors and instead focus on understanding how the universal algorithm of evolution is literally and specifically implemented in the information-processing substrate of human economic activity. While both biological and economic systems share the core algorithm of evolu

During the 1970s, as scientists came to know more about the behaviors of complex systems, they became increasingly interested in systems in which the particles were not simple things with fixed behaviors like water molecules, but were things with some intelligence and the capability of adapting to their environment. Water molecules cannot adapt the

Businesses fuse Physical and Social Technologies together and express them into the environment in the form of products and services.

But saying that both economic and biological systems are subclasses of a more general and universal class of evolutionary systems tells us a lot. This is because researchers believe that there are general laws of evolutionary systems.28 Scientists consider certain features of nature universal. For example, gravity works the same way on the earth as

The evolutionary economist Richard Nelson of Columbia University has pointed out that there are in fact two types of technology that play a major role in economic growth.35 The first is Physical Technology; this is what we are accustomed to thinking of as technology, things such as bronze-making techniques, steam engines, and microchips. Social Tec