The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good: Amazon.fr: Robert H. Frank: Livres anglais et étrangers. Darwin Explains Our Economy, Says Robert Frank. The Darwin Economy by Robert H. Frank. The Darwin Economy and the Hamlet Problem of Economics - Real Time Economics. Darwin, the Market Whiz. Robert Frank on ‘the Darwin Economy’ Robert Frank is an economist at Cornell University and author, most recently, of “The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition and the Common Good,” which argues that in a time of austerity, the best way to cut budget deficits is to focus our cuts on the spending we do to compete with one another rather than the spending that actually makes our lives better.
You can read a short version of the argument here. We spoke about the book Friday, and an edited transcript of our conversation follows. Ezra Klein: As a longtime Robert Frank fan, this book, it seems to me, is a new way of making a point you’ve been making since at least “Winner-Take-All Society” and “Luxury Fever”about how decisions that are economically rational for individuals can make all of us collectively worse off. In this case, the metaphor is evolution.
Robert Frank: It’s exactly that. EK: And your argument is that this happens among humans, too. EK: And then in the economy? RF: Take traffic congestion. Robert H. Frank's The Darwin Economy, reviewed. Charles Darwin, not Adam Smith, will one day be considered the father of economics, says Cornell University professor and New York Times columnist Robert H. Frank in his new book, The Darwin Economy. He argues that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection gives a better description of how markets work, and fail, than Smith's theory of the invisible hand. This insight reverses two centuries of intellectual traffic. Thomas Malthus' ideas shaped Darwin's, and many of the tools of modern evolutionary biology, such as game theory, are borrowed from economics. It leads Frank to many excellent suggestions for improving society by means of a fairer and more efficient tax system that takes the laws of biology into account. The same insight also leads him to say some misleading things about how natural selection works.
Frank bases his argument on the Darwinian notion that life is graded on a curve. This has a lot going for it as an economic metaphor. Or rather, no one agrees.