Economics focus: The Cambrian age of economics

摘要

Before he turned to the bigger fish that occupy the White House, Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton University and a polemicist for the New York Times, enjoyed nothing more than frying the cranks, impostors and other forms of pondlife he found outside the mainstream of economics. In 1997 he singled out the purveyors of so-called "bionomics". Bionomics argued that economics was hopelessly wedded to the principles of mechanics, and should instead borrow ideas from evolutionary biology. After all, it declared, "a modern market economy is like a tropical rainforest".