The last three decades have seen an upsurge in the number of publications addressing themes that have come to be grouped under the heading of “evolutionary economics”, paralleled by the foundation of new journals and new scientific societies devoted to the subject matter.
It was a great moment for the science of economics, and for evolutionary economics in particular, when An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change was published, in 1982, by Richard R.
Nelson and Sidney G. Winter - a work that served as an icebreaker and, arguably, gave the early stages their critical momentum.In a recent bibliometric account comprising the abstracts of articles published in all economic journals over the past half-century, Sandra Silva and Aurora Teixeira have been documenting the impressive magnitudes and structural dynamic of this trend - a trend that has accelerated tremendously in the last two decades, considering that 90 per cent of this body of research is recorded as having been published since 1990 (Silva and Teixeira 2009).
The aim of this entry is to present evolutionary economics as a particular school of thought. To this end, it is necessary to keep the analysis general enough to highlight the major differences from other schools of thought, but it is also necessary to frame the general exposition in such a way that it allows the main lines of current research to be accommodated systematically. Inevitably, the choice of general exposition can be expected to differ substantially from author to author, and as a consequence any choice of research fields and works is bound to be subjective.
The best approach in these circumstances is to follow the Popperian postulate of falsification and to make the premises upon which the choice of exposition and of research fields is based as explicit as possible. Specifically, this entry proposes that (evolutionary) economics should be conceived of as rule-based economics.
Turning to the particular sources used, the discussion of ontological foundations draws on Dopfer (2005), as does that about rule taxonomy and the architecture of micro-meso-macro, which also draws on Dopfer and Potts (2008) and Dopfer et al. (2004). All scientific thinking and advance rests on the shoulders of giants, as Newton has remarked famously, which in the present case suggests referring to - as major pioneers of an evolutionary approach to economics - Thorstein B. Veblen, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Alfred Marshall, and Friedrich August von Hayek.