Libertarian paternalists hold that biases and distortions in human decision-making justify paternalistic interference affecting individuals’ decisions. The aim of this paper is to analzye to what extent an evolutionary outlook supports libertarian paternalism. I will put forward three...

While Schumpeter’s broad theory of how capitalist economies worked articulated in his Theory of Economic Development received strong attention in his lifetime, it was neoclassical economic theory that took hold of the profession in the last half of the twentieth century, and today few...

The evolutionary vision in which history matters is of an evolving economy driven by bursts of technological change initiated by agents facing uncertainty and producing long term, path-dependent growth and shorter-term, non-random investment cycles. The alternative vision in which history does...

The paper is based on the acknowledgement that properties of markets stemming from features of demand are too frequently overlooked in the economic literature, particularly among evolutionary scholars. The overall goal is to show that “demand matters” to understand properly observed...

In this paper we show that a rational consumer choice along the lines traditionally suggested might lead to paradoxical results if one considers multidimensional goods, which incorporate a series of incommensurable aspects. Thereby, we explore the similarity between the resulting paradox and...

Positional behaviour is arguably a source of social externalities. Remedies for this market failure are defended by some authors and rejected by others. One of the issues discussed is the role that the competition for positional goods may have in generating technological innovation. This article...

This article sheds light on the impact of Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development over the last 100 years, and identifies insights from that work that are less well-known, but that have the potential for informing current developments in evolutionary economics. We identify these insights...