Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart A. Kauffman

Author:Stuart A. Kauffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

THE ECONOMIC WEB AND THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE WEALTH

Economists employ the concepts of complementary and substitute goods. A hammer and a nail are complements since they are used together to create value. A nail and a screw are, largely, substitutes, since you can usually replace one with the other.

Now imagine points in a large room for all 10 billion goods and services in the global economy. Draw green lines between points that are complements, and red lines between points that are substitutes. The resulting graph is a depiction of the global economic web as it stands today. Fifty thousand years ago the web would have contained a hundred to a thousand points.

Thus, over time, the economic web has expanded into its adjacent possible. Our task is to understand how it expands, and what role the structure of the web itself plays in its own expansion. None of this is known. But it is virtually inconceivable that this evolution, which persistently creates new economic niches and destroys old ones, is not a central part of economic growth.

Here is a first step. Most novel goods and services enter the economy as either complements to or substitutes for existing goods and services. There is no point in inventing the TV channel changer, for instance, until the television is invented and deployed reasonably widely, and there are multiple channels. So the channel changer is a complement to the television. This simple example demonstrates that, as the economic web evolves, it does persistently create new economic niches for new goods and services that fit functionally, hence sensibly, into the existing web. The web begets its own future in ways that we cannot foretell. But, in addition, the television might become of use for other purposes, say long distance banking, as the computer has come to have new uses with respect to word processing, and the engine block that became the chasse. Once that happens still new, unforeseeable, functional compliments may fit into the still new niches that the existing good, used for a new purpose, affords. Thus, it is not at all clear, even for existing goods and services, that we can actually prestate all the uses to which they might be put, hence which new economic niches they might create.

In considering the growth of the economic web, therefore, a central question is whether, on average, each new good or service affords less than one, exactly one, or more than one new complementary or substitute possibility in the adjacent possible. If the answer is more than one, then the web (ignoring for the moment investment capital, adoption of new technologies, and other issues) can grow exponentially. That is, if each new good or service affords more than 1.0 new niches for yet further new goods and services, then new economic niches explode exponentially as the economic web grows in diversity. Under these circumstances the very diversity of the web “autocatalytically” drives its own growth into the adjacent possible, affording ever new economic niches—ever new ways of making a living.

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