Hostname: page-component-5d84bcc8dc-gpt8h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-09-15T21:14:59.343Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Causality and regularity in a ‘creative world’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

ULRICH WITT
ULRICH WITT*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute, Jena, Germany and Griffith Business School, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QL, Australia
*
*Email: witt@evoecon.mpg.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

With its ability to incessantly create new actions and innovations the economy presents itself as an open, evolving (self-transforming) system. In their ‘economics for a creative world’ Koppl et al. (2014) try to account for the features of that system and discuss methodological consequences for its analysis. Claiming that ‘ . . . novelty and innovation are uncaused’ and that ‘ . . . no laws entail the evolution of the econosphere’ they hold that fundamental scientific principles do not apply. In the present comment it will be argued that both claims are difficult to defend. Causality and law-like hypotheses also apply to novelty and innovation.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 55 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Edelman, G. M. and Tononi, G. (2000), A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002), The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971), The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hayek, F. A. (1964), ‘The Theory of Complex Phenomena’, in Bunge, M. A. (ed.), The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Hodgson, G. M. and Knudsen, T. (2010), Darwin's Conjecture – The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Koppl, R., Kauffman, S., Felin, T., and Longo, G. (2014), ‘Economics for a Creative World’, Journal of Institutional Economics, published online: DOI: 10.1017/S1744137414000150.Google Scholar
Mitchell, S. (2009), ‘Complexity and Explanation in the Social Sciences’, in Mantzavinos, C. (ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schumpeter, J. A. (1934), Theory of Economic Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. First published as Theorie der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, 1912.Google Scholar
Schumpeter, J. A. (2002), ‘The Economy as a Whole’, (seventh chapter of Theorie der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, 1912 [English translation by U. Backhaus]), Industry and Innovation, 9, 93–145.Google Scholar
Setterfield, M. (2003), ‘Critical Realism and Formal Modelling – Incompatible Bedfellows?’, in Downward, P. (ed.), Applied Economics and the Critical Realist Critique, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 71–88.Google Scholar
Tinbergen, N. (1963), ‘On Aims and Methods in Ethology’, Zeitschrift fuer Tierpsychologie, 20: 410–433.Google Scholar
Witt, U. (2003), ‘Generic Features of Evolution and its Continuity – A Trans-disciplinary Perspective’, Theoria, 18 (48): 273–288.Google Scholar
Witt, U. (2009a), ‘Propositions About Novelty’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 70: 311–320.Google Scholar
Witt, U. (2009b), ‘Novelty and the Bounds of Unknowledge in Economics’, Journal of Economic Methodology. 16 (4): 361–375.Google Scholar