Dennis Snower and David Sloan Wilson - Rethinking economics for flourishing people and planet

The fundamental challenges confronting humanity are not the failure of particular nations or institutions or businesses or civil organizations, but rather the disconnect between our economic, political, and social systems. Dennis Snower and David Sloan Wilson, converging economics and evolution, have a plan to ameliorate the decoupling of economic prosperity and political success from social and environmental prosperity, a decoupling that destabilizes our planet.

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They are each giants in their fields and beyond, not only for their scholarship but for the way they are able to translate it into the lived and living world.

Dennis J. Snower is the Founding President and a Fellow of the Global Solutions Initiative and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford. He was President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Professor of Economics at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel and visiting professor at many universities around the world. He has created some of the foundational theories that have evolved the domain of economics. He advises regularly a variety of international organizations and national governments on macroeconomic policy, employment policy and welfare state policy, including providing intellectual and research-based support to the G20 and G7 forums.

David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life, both in his own research and as president of ProSocial World, a non-profit dedicated to enabling individual and collective action for positive cultural change and widespread cooperation. He is author of well over 200 academic publications in journals cutting across biology, evolution, behavior, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and anthropology.

Together, though, they bridge across ideas, domains, beliefs, systems. Simply, they transcend. And that is one of the most remarkable things about both Dennis and David and about their friendship.  I'm endlessly fascinated by this process of transcendence, of moving beyond, so I wanted to have them on to talk about what that looks like in the context of their work, lives, and friendship.

We'll explore that in the context of a new theory of economics they have authored, first described in the article, "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Economics" that orients economics toward the flourishing of people and planet. There will be five of these, the first one covering 'the multilevel paradigm.' It represents a paradigm change in economics, which means it redefines the framework of assumptions, principles and methods from which the members of the community work. But the domain of this work is more than economics, reaching into the political, social, and environmental systems in which economics is embedded; at once planetary and deeply personal in its implications.

The paradigm itself establishes key elements for a new economics. Those elements are functional organization, embedded economics, and uncertainty. These are ideas that are changing our world, remaking the adjacent possible - those configurations of society that are reachable from where we are now.

But people beget ideas, so this is a conversation about the people and the friendship behind the ideas in this theory.

This is a new kind of Origins episode, centered less on the pivotal moments in a given life, but on the pivotal moments in the development of a way of thinking that is changing our world and the human lives that have stewarded it.

Flourishing is the starting point for the theory. So, I wanted to have this conversation with David and Dennis to explore a kind of rich history of the theory, the cultural and planetary milieu into which it emerges, its formative uncertainties, the paradoxes worked through, the prospective it outlines, and the friendship that founded it, sustained it, and was perhaps sustained by it.