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What do you think of when you think of economics? Supply and demand curves crossing? Constrained optimization problems? Is economics just a science (or black art) dealing with the money supply, comparative advantage, and inflation? Over the past fifty years, there have been a number of bold efforts at pushing the frontiers of economic analysis past such obviously "economic" issues. Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize for applying economic analysis to issues ranging from marriage to discrimination, and several economists, including Lawrence Iannaconne at George Mason University, have profitably deployed economics to study religion.
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Even these bold steps outside of the traditional subject matter of economics left a great deal of the world outside economists' domain. No longer. Geerat Vermeij, a geologist, has taken economic reasoning even further, arguing in Nature: An Economic History that economists and natural scientists are asking the same kinds of questions in their seemingly disparate fields. He contends that "common principles underlie all these diverse fields, and that these principles imply broadly predictable patterns of change through time, patterns with interesting implications for our future." Margaret Schabas, a philosopher with an economics degree, makes the case in The Natural Origins of Economics that economics once had strong connections to the natural sciences, connections that she thinks the discipline should revive. These are provocative assertions worth considering in detail.
Is Natural Science Economics?Vermeij defines an economy to be "a system of living, self-interested, interacting beings or entities that compete for locally scarce resources." With this broad definition, much of the natural world falls into a system of natural economies. Vermeij makes a convincing case that thinking about large swaths of the natural world in terms of a competition for scarce resources is both accurate and useful. For example, Vermeij's science leads him to reflect on the importance of the limits on resources available in the immediate location of an organism. Success in the competition for these resources "means perpetuation in the face of predictable and unpredictable change, achieved by entities that control the right resources for a time long enough to leave descendants."
Why have we been treating human activity as different in kind from the activities of mollusks and plants? Vermeij sets up and knocks down three possible explanations. First, the differences may simply be too large, and so human and nonhuman behavior is simply too dissimilar for analogies between them to be enlightening. He rejects this claim, arguing that "our economic system is only one of many variations on a simple common theme: an array of adaptable entities competing for resources." The division of labor among humans is simply an expression of the same behavior that causes the seastar Pisaster ochraceus to eat mostly mussels and barnacles in the northern Pacific while eating mostly snails along the Baja California coast.
Second, man's technological achievements, including "caus[ing] destruction more rapidly and on a vastly larger scale than other life forms," set us apart. Not so, says Vermeij, with dry humor: "If the simple life forms of the Archean—the era of Earth history before 2.5 billion years ago (Ga)—could have passed laws against pollution, their principle target surely would have been oxygen. … Pollution has remained a pervasive phenomenon ever since." Our cars and factories are thus merely the latest "in a very long line of environment-altering activities of living entities." Even globalization was "by no means unknown in the prehuman biosphere," with "birds, mammals, fish, sea turtles, and even insects" engaging in long distance migrations.
