Author's Personal Reflections on Economic History and Evolutionary Biology

This reveals my bias for economic history. It seems dry as a bone until you find something terrific like those insights. It happens that I had written both theories, and published one, decades before | found those great precedents. Should I have been chagrined? Of course not. Forgotten or unnoticed precedents are at least as much fun to point out as the surprises they showed ahead of me. I will also reveal a bias for evolutionary biology. Its main axiom, the biological imperative, becomes one of mine. The idea is that behaviors are selected for successful reproduction. | will try to show that the classical school treated this as axiomatic from Petty through Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Mill. Malthus was only the most obvious case. It lapsed from attention when a brilliant new insight called marginalism preferred to do without explanations for tastes. Above all comes my bias for the great thinkers in those fields. We saw that as to Bob Trivers. Although | often cite them to disagree with them, | see all as giants from whose shoulders | slip in trying to climb. I don’t kick sand on 97-pound weaklings. Mill was a mensch who gives us all lessons in attribution and generosity, particularly to schools he disputed, and who nonetheless didn’t mind being a minority of one in his books or in parliament. Petty was something beyond. Polymath, self-made tycoon, anatomist, music teacher, father of national accounts, originator of present value theory and human capital and next generation theory, and esteemed by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx for other innovations I don’t mention. Such men are understood slowly and incompletely. Forward By The Author 04/18/16 4 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010916