Is novelty always a good thing? Towards an evolutionary welfare economics

Arbeitspapier

Schumpeter's and Hayek's view of market coordination as being not about efficiency, but about endogenous change and never-ending discovery has been increasingly recognized even by the mainstream of economics. Underlying this view is the notion of creative learning agents who bring about novelty. We argue that apart from the challenges it poses for positive theorizing, novelty (be it technological, institutional or commercial) also has a complex normative dimension that standard welfare economics is unsuited to deal with. We show that welfare economics has to be reconstructed on the basis of evolutionary-naturalistic insights into the way human agents bring about, value and respond to novelty-induced change.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Papers on Economics and Evolution ; No. 0903

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement ; Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
• Subject: Novelty ; Endogenous Change ; Preference Formation ; Welfare ; Justice

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Schubert, Christian
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Max Planck Institute of Economics
• (where): Jena
• (when): 2009

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/32662
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET