It seems like it is the biologists like Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley who are becoming the most popular (or at least very important) carriers of free-market economics for the simple fact that the “free-market” is simply another naturally-selected mechanism for creating order, this time socio-economic order, instead of the popularly known biological order created by biological evolution/genetics/etc. The free-market can only be properly understood from an evolutionary perspective. As Hayek wrote:

“We understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution…”

So it makes sense that the biologists, so firmly grounded on evolution, in their attempts to understand the social order, are beginning to stumble upon Hayek. In some ways thanks to this, free-market economics is now firmly riding on the unstoppable evolutionary train which will bulldoze its way through the economic ignorance that is so prevalent in academia, just like it did with religious mysticism. Matt Ridley, as I mention all the time in previous articles, is the best and latest example. He mentioned in a 2011 speech:

“As someone who came to Fredrick von Hayek comparatively late in life, I’m still catching up with him. And I can tell you by the way, that it’s possible to go through an entire education to phd level in the best schools in the British system without any of your teachers breathing the words Adam Smith let alone Fredrick Hayek. Indeed, many of the insights I thought I had discovered in my own readings and writings on the frontier of evolutionary biology and economics it turns out Hayek had long before me…The field of anthropology and archaeology needs Hayek quite badly…It’s Hayek who first puts it all together.” — Matt Ridley

[See my review of Matt Ridley’s excellent and very “Hayekian” book “The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge]

Hayek, having a ridiculously profound understanding of the economy/’social order’ by standing on the civilization-carrying shoulders of Ludwig von Mises already explained all the important parts and even predicted that the future study of economics would be a complete evolutionary discipline. He writes in his final book “The Fatal Conceit”:

“When I began my work I felt that I was

nearly alone in working on the evolutionary formation of such highly

complex self-maintaining orders. Meanwhile, researches on this kind of

problem — under various names, such as autopoiesis, cybernetics,

homeostasis, spontaneous order, self-organisation, synergetics, systems

theory, and so on — have become so numerous that I have been able to

study closely no more than a few of them. This book thus becomes a

tributary of a growing stream apparently leading to the gradual

development of an evolutionary (but certainly not simply Neo —

Darwinian) ethics parallel and supplementary to, yet quite

distinct from, the already well-advanced development of evolutionary

epistemology.”

These guys better hurry up and become ‘secondhand dealers’ of Mises and Hayek’s ideas ASAP, we are running out of time and very likely to be an evolutionary dead-end.