I confess that this book casts me as that little boy crashing the economic party, and maybe the evolutionary biology one too, in trust that outsiders might have better chances to spot the obvious unseen. What else was the pay rule? I derived it easily from doctrines already accepted, I think, and anyhow hard to refute. Those were the total return turism and Ben-Porath’s equation for human growth. The maximand rule or deadweight loss rule would prove it as well. How could Becker have missed that what holds for investment in job training by employers holds for any investment by anyone in anything? How could students of the age-wage problem have missed the obvious solution? Investment implies expected recovery with interest, by the investor or a chosen donee, and recovery means recovery of depreciation. I belabor this point because tradition dies hard, and naturally tends to circle wagons under attack. I doubt that my surprise attack will meet the resistance Darwin’s found. Darwin’s met resistance founded on faith. I took pains to show that my version requires only selection for lineage survival, and that a benign Artificer
might ordain the same.
Evolutionary Biology and Hamilton's Rule
Economics, meaning any quantitative rationale of choice, normally describes humans and human choice. That goes for this book too. But some treatments of economics including this one are meant to fit other creatures as well. My axioms have kept that in mind. The mortal and reproducing population need not be human. Much of the animal kingdom, | think, shows convergent tastes and predictions or acts as if it did. The biological imperative is meant to apply to all. All, as I see it, own capital of both factors. Even protozoans own (“monopolize”) the nutrients they assimilate and the space they occupy. Humans are exceptional in their cultural accumulations of learning and technology shown in our secular (lasting) growth.
But I did not make those features axioms.
| argued that economics tended to reason explicitly or implicitly from the biological
imperative, meaning what | call “ends” in lineage survival, from Petty through Smith
Chapter 7 Petty’s Idea 2/3/16 3
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