Economic Markets Versus Basic Needs: A Biological Approach to the “Dismal Science”

Evolutionary biology as a science has the unique advantage of being grounded in a set of theoretical assumptions that are supported by some 3.8 billion years of empirical evidence.  The “ground-zero” premise, so to speak, of the discipline is that the basic, continuing, inescapable challenge for all living systems is survival and reproduction.  Life is quintessentially a contingent “survival enterprise,” and any organized society, whether it be in leaf cutter ants or in humankind, is fundamentally a “collective survival enterprise.”  Whatever may be our aspirations, or our illusions, the underlying purpose of a human society is to provide for the basic needs of its members, and of the society as a whole.  Survival is the paradigmatic problem for all human societies; it’s a prerequisite for any other, more exalted objectives.

Modern economic science (sometimes called “the dismal science,” after philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s famous put-down) has its theoretical roots in the classical economists’ dour, one-sided assumptions about human nature and human motivation (i.e., the wholly rational, self-interested, profit-maximizing “economic man”), and it has traditionally focused on exchanges of “goods and services” in supposedly expansive, self-balancing markets.  As a result, economics is theoretically oblivious to the survival problem and sometimes even cavalier about it.  Over the years some economists have even denied the existence of objective human needs.  Life is all about our transitory “tastes and preferences,” they claim. (In fairness, economics has been evolving over the past decade or two; see especially the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization special issue in 2013 devoted to “Rethinking Economics from an Evolutionary Perspective.”)

Because evolutionary biology, in contrast, is concerned with the existential problem of biological survival, it therefore poses a fundamental challenge to the theoretical foundations of traditional mainstream economics.  It superimposes an empirically-based normative criterion onto the performance of any given economy, as well as second-guessing various conventional economic measures.  In effect, evolutionary biology provides an alternative set of account books for assessing the performance of an economy, including especially the outcomes for the collective survival enterprise.  It’s not indifferent to such conventional economic measures as gross domestic product, per capita income, growth in the volume of goods and services, etc., but its primary concern is how well a society meets the basic needs of its citizens and whether or not the underlying “bioeconomy” (to borrow a term) is performing well and is sustainable going forward.

Contrary to the naysayers, moreover, our basic needs are not just a theoretical abstraction, nor a matter of personal preference.  They comprise some 14 distinct domains of biologically-defined survival requisites.  These include a number of obvious categories, like adequate nutrition, fresh water, physical safety, physical health, mental health, and waste elimination, as well as some items that we may take for granted like thermoregulation, which can entail many different technologies, from clothing to blankets, fire wood, heating oil, and air conditioning.  Our basic needs even include adequate sleep (about one-third of our lives), personal mobility, and healthy respiration, which can’t always be assured these days.  Perhaps least obvious but most important are the requirements for reproducing and nurturing the next generation.  In short, our basic biological needs cut a very broad swath through our economy and our society. (They are discussed in some detail in my 2011 book, The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice.)

Four things must also be kept in mind about our basic biological needs (1) They are increasingly well-understood and well-documented; (2) while our individual needs may vary somewhat, in general they are equally shared by all of us; (3) we are dependent upon many others, and our society as a whole, for the satisfaction of these needs; and (4) more or less severe personal harm will result if any of these needs is not satisfied.  In conventional economic science, such negative consequences may be viewed only as externalities, collateral damage, “creative destruction,” or the unfortunate cost-side of economic progress.  This, in a nutshell, is how we got global climate warming, ocean pollution, the collapse of fisheries, rapid topsoil depletion, the decimation of boreal forests, and the decline in fresh water resources, not to mention global poverty and other man-made health and welfare problems.  However, from a biological perspective, these side-effects represent adaptive failures that are putting our evolutionary future at risk.  The biological realities are overwhelming our economic theories.

What is to be done?  Among many other things, we could shift our priorities from improving our economic indicators to improving our “social indicators.” There are many different sources of data these days that measure how well we are doing with respect to meeting the basic needs of our citizens, including at least two major indexes of societal well-being, the U.N.’s Human Development Index and the relatively new Social Progress Index.  Ideally, it would be wonderful if we could improve both our economic indicators and our social indicators at the same time.  But we must also imagine the unthinkable (for a western capitalist society), that our economic indicators might actually need to be scaled back even as the health and well-being of our population improves, along with ensuring the long-term sustainability of the collective survival enterprise.  Nowadays, alas, the reverse is too often the case, and all too many of us are in denial about the negative tradeoffs we are making. 

Going forward, the “bioeconomy” must take precedence.  (An outline for achieving what might be called “the next major transition” in evolution is provided in my forthcoming 2018 book Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind.)  To borrow a punch-line from the great twentieth century biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “the future is not vouchsafed by any law of nature, but it may be striven for.”