But while being larger than his rival makes an individual bull more likely to prevail in such battles, prodigious size is a clear handicap for bulls as a group, making them far more vulnerable to sharks and other predators. The victor claims near-exclusive sexual access to a harem that may number as many as a hundred cows. During the mating season, pairs of mature bulls battle one another ferociously for hours on end, until one finally trudges off in defeat, bloodied and exhausted. Size matters in those battles, and hence the evolutionary arms races that produce larger males.Įlephant seals are an extreme but instructive example.10 Bulls of the species often weigh almost six thousand pounds, more than five times as much as females and almost as much as a Lincoln Navigator SUV. So it’s no surprise that males often battle furiously for access to mates. The latter don’t pass their genes along, making them the ultimate losers in Darwinian terms. The qualifier is important, because when some take multiple mates, others get none. Most vertebrate species are polygynous, meaning that males take more than one mate if they can. This is in fact the expected result for mutations that confer advantage in head-to-head competition among members of the same species. In other cases, however, mutations that help the individual prove quite harmful to the larger group. A mutation that codes for keener eyesight in one particular hawk, for example, serves the interests of that individual, but its inevitable spread also makes hawks as a species more successful. Sometimes individual and group interests coincide, he recognized, and in such cases we often get invisible hand-like results. One of his central insights was that natural selection favors traits and behaviors primarily according to their effect on individual organisms, not larger groups. The real challenge to the invisible hand is rooted in the very logic of the competitive process itself.Ĭharles Darwin was one of the first to perceive the underlying problem clearly. But competition was much more easily restrained in Smith’s day than it is now. Like Smith, modern progressive critics of the market system tend to attribute its failings to conspiracies to restrain competition. His skepticism was on full display, for example, when he wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” To him, what was remarkable was that self-interested actions often led to socially benign outcomes. Smith never believed that the invisible hand guaranteed good outcomes in all circumstances. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. He wrote, for example, that the profit-seeking business owner “intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Smith’s own account, however, was far more circumspect. In the end, Smith argued, consumers are the ultimate beneficiaries of all this churning.īut many of Smith’s modern disciples believe he made the much bolder claim that markets always harness individual self-interest to produce the greatest good for society as a whole. But rival firms are quick to mimic the innovations, and the resulting competition quickly causes prices to fall in line with the new, lower costs. In the short run, these steps work just as the producers had hoped. Producers rush to introduce improved product designs and cost-saving innovations for the sole purpose of capturing market share and profits from their rivals. Without question, Adam Smith’s invisible hand was a genuinely ground breaking insight. Why does the invisible hand, “which says that competition challenges self-interest for the common good” break down? Frank, surprisingly, sides with Darwin, arguing that within the next century Darwin will unseat Smith as the intellectual founder of economics. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, takes on the debate of who was a better economist-Adam Smith or Charles Darwin. In The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and The Common Good Robert H.
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