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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Dennis J. Snower |
| Abstract: | Evolutionary economics explains economic change through variation, selection, retention, transmission, innovation, and institutional transformation, whereas much of economics explains outcomes through purposive choice. This article argues that these modes of explanation become recursively connected once economic agents can represent the evolutionary processes in which they participate and intentionally alter their operation. It develops the concept of reflexive economic evolution: agents do not merely choose within given constraints or adapt to existing selection pressures, but can generate new possibilities, modify selection environments, organize transmission, and sometimes revise the criteria and mechanisms by which variants are selected. This latter second-order capacity is termed meta-selection. Reflexive economic evolution does not imply comprehensive control or a predetermined social end-state: guidance changes the distribution of possible trajectories under uncertainty rather than determining a trajectory. The framework shows how intentional and evolutionary explanations can be causally complementary, why effective agency is partly endogenous, and why policy should be understood not only as changing current outcomes but also as reshaping the evolutionary environment in which subsequent adaptation and innovation occur. |
| Keywords: | evolutionary economics, economic methodology, agency, reflexivity, causation, meta-selection, institutions, teleology |
| JEL: | B41 B52 D02 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12965 |
| By: | Simon Gaechter (University of Nottingham); Jonathan F. Schulz (George Mason University); Christian Thoeni (University of Lausanne) |
| Abstract: | Can common institutions produce different gains from cooperation across culturally diverse environments? We address this question using standardized repeated public-goods experiments, with and without punishment, in 43 diverse countries (n = 3, 876). The design permits direct comparison of voluntary cooperation, conditional cooperation, peer-enforced cooperation, and punishment behavior under identical incentives. We document large cross-societal differences: realized cooperation gains vary by 81 percentage points between the highest- and lowest-gain subject pools. We interpret these patterns through a belief-based model: everyday experiences of cooperation shape expectations about others’ cooperation and the use of punishment. Consistent with model predictions, cooperation and punishment correlate with a cross-country Cooperative Environment Index. Mechanism experiments (n = 1, 092) exogenously vary exposure to strong enforcement. This exposure raises later beliefs and cooperation after enforcement is removed. Together, the findings provide evidence that common institutions can generate unequal gains because their effectiveness depends on expectations about cooperation and its enforcement. |
| Keywords: | Cross-cultural experiments; voluntary cooperation; peer punishment; institutional quality; cultural values; cooperative environment index; ABC model of cooperation; mechanism experiments |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notcdx:2026-06 |
| By: | Guarnieri, Eleonora (University of Bristol, CEPR, CESifo); Tur-Prats, Ana (University of California, Merced) |
| Abstract: | Why do some cultures go extinct while others prevail? We show that a society’s risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss, is shaped by its ancestral gender norms and by how these differ from those of competing cultures. Using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index for a global sample of languages, we first show that languages from more gender-equal societies are likelier to go extinct. In our framework, male-dominant societies are more expansionist through two channels, military capacity sustained by surplus extraction and demographic pressure from women's specialization in domestic and reproductive labor, and therefore expand at the expense of gender-egalitarian groups. We test this in two settings. Under European colonization, we find that Indigenous groups more gender-equal than their colonizers are more vulnerable to extinction, which is best explained by asymmetries in male dominance rather than dominance more broadly. Exploiting local variation in neighbors' gender structure across Africa, we show that languages from more gender-egalitarian societies are less likely to survive in cells located close to male-dominant neighbors, with military capacity and population pressure predicting language expansion. |
| Keywords: | cultural diversity, language extinction, gender norms, inter-group contact |
| JEL: | Z10 O10 F54 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18947 |
| By: | Aminjonov, Ulugbek (Trier University); Bargain, Olivier (University of Bordeaux) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how combinations of ancestral cultural norms are associated with women’s empowerment across ethnic groups worldwide. Linking DHS data to the Ethnographic Atlas, we develop a hybrid supervised–unsupervised approach combining Partial Least Squares and k-means clustering to identify five probabilistic normative regimes. Severe disempowerment is associated with an accumulation of restrictive norms, while religious norms and women’s agricultural roles distinguish higher-empowerment environments within broadly patriarchal configurations. Further up the gradient, contrasts concern hierarchical social institutions, then kinship and the loosening of patriarchal arrangements, before more gender-neutral configurations prevail at the highest empowerment levels. Norms’ salience varies with the configurations in which they are embedded, revealing strongly non-monotonic patterns. These findings are robust to adjustment for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and a range of sensitivity checks. The analysis provides a global mapping of ancestral normative environments associated with women’s agency and identifies configurations most closely related to severe intra-household inequality. |
| Keywords: | women’s empowerment, ancestral norms, cultural persistence, kinship systems, machine learning, gender inequality, DHS, Ethnographic Atlas |
| JEL: | J16 O15 Z13 C38 D13 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18955 |
| By: | Youngblood, Mason |
| Abstract: | Cultural evolutionary models are usually easy to simulate but difficult to fit, because most have no tractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference (SBI) addresses this by treating the simulator itself as the likelihood, and now ranges from rejection-based approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) to amortized neural posterior estimation (NPE). Knowing which to use is hard, partly because they are rarely compared on the same model and data. In this tutorial I fit a Wright-Fisher-style model of baby name popularity to uncensored female naming records from South Australia (1944-2017, with inference on 1981-2017), comparing rejection ABC, ABC with random forests, and NPE with BayesFlow on one shared set of 10, 000 simulations. The model includes frequency dependence (β), an age-dependent bias (α), and random variation (γ). Recovery varies widely across parameters and methods, from r = 0.96-1.00 for β to r = 0.39-0.97 for γ, and these differences track what each estimator does with the summary statistics it is given and, for γ, how much of the signal those statistics retain. I use the comparison to work through what makes a parameter identifiable, the diagnostics that indicate whether a posterior can be trusted, and common failure modes. All code and data are provided. |
| Date: | 2026–09–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:c5q2h_v1 |