Friday, August 8, 2014

George Cooper — Are We Darwinian Competitors Or Classical Optimizers?

I am grateful to the author Paul Claireaux who, through his website irateinvestment.com, has drawn my attention to the work of Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University who has published papers which, I believe, directly address the question of whether we humans are absolute wealth maximizes or relative wealth competitors.… 
If the findings of Professor Oswald are correct then, as I argue in Money, Blood and Revolution, we may be better off thinking of human behavior as driven by a Darwinian competitive paradigm rather than a classical optimization or maximization paradigm.
Are We Darwinian Competitors Or Classical Optimizers?
George Cooper

6 comments:

Ryan Harris said...

Stunning that the question even needs to be posed; Surprising that any human being with any life experience would try to make the case that one or the other is accurate when our world is filled with organisms that display every possible combination of cooperative and competitive behaviors.

Matt Franko said...

Well that is Darwinism Ryan ie combinative organization by itself somehow "naturally" coming out of chaos via random chance...

rsp,

Anonymous said...

Isn't that a false dichotomy?

Schofield said...

"Stunning that the question even needs to be posed"

But Ryan how many human beings consciously lead their lives based on a philosophy of the continuous need to find mechanisms to balance the two behaviors and especially since there are also negative and positive aspects to the two behaviors?

Ryan Harris said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tom Hickey said...

Isn't that a false dichotomy?

Yes, assumes methodological individualism rather than methodological holism or methodological localism.

There may be many factors involved in evaluation, decision-making, choice and behavior, both individual and group. Organization and cooperation are at least as significant as competition and utility maximizing. Trying to reduce human behavior to a single principle is probably a fool's errand when social systems are complex and human beings variegated.