Outlook
The modern economy has been called - with much justification - a knowledge economy. This may be misleading, however, as knowledge is required in a traditional economy as well to perform operations for solving the scarcity problem.
What the statement means is that, at the present and in the future, it may not be possible to acquire an adequate understanding of economic phenomena without due recognition of the significance of knowledge - beyond prices and quantities.Central to our analysis has been the recognition that knowledge enables economic operations. Simple as it is, this tenet allows an important distinction to be drawn between two major levels of economic enquiry. One is the level of knowledge for economic operations, the other that of operations under the assumption of given knowledge. Evolutionary economics deals with the former, neoclassical mainstream economics with the latter.
Analysing the structure and change of economic knowledge calls for the adoption of an evolutionary ontology; in turn, theoretical enquiry into the phenomena of the operant level may be conducted validly on the basis of mechanistic ontology (constant knowledge may attain the status of immutable “law”). Evolutionary economics considers the problem of economic knowledge to be centre stage, and it aims to reconstruct economic theory on the basis of - semantic and analytical - evolutionary ontology.
By addressing the knowledge level, evolutionary economics opens up the problem space required to identify and - possibly - contribute to solving the most pressing problems of a modern economy. In its grand theoretical design, it is heading towards an integration of Smith (structure) and Darwin (process).
Kurt Dθpfer