How institutions and cultures change: An evolutionary perspective

초록

Some changes in institutions and cultures in the past have been deliberately implemented by well-informed forward-looking elites either acting as a centralized authority or as the result of bargaining among the leaders of a small number of competing groups. But other changes are better understood as the substantially unintended result of uncoordinated actions by large numbers of actors with sparse information, pursuing local rather than global objectives. We represent a population's culture and institutions as a convention – a symmetric mutual best response – and the process of change as a transition from one to another of these equilibria, resulting from the joint effects of two equilibrium selection process: competition between populations and transitions within populations. Decentralized transitions are illustrated by a series of prehistoric and historic cases including the emergence of private property and of the national bureaucratic state and the demise of serfdom. This dual dynamic allows us to identify the cultural-institutional characteristics – the degree of inequality between rich and poor and the level of average income – that are likely to emerge and persist in an evolutionary equilibrium selection process. Our model provides a novel analytical framework with explicit dynamics to explore hypotheses in historical economics such as the Marx-inspired idea that exogenous changes in technology may drive institutional and cultural changes and the “efficient design” hypothesis borrowed from evolutionary biology applied to cultures and institutions. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

키워드