Ferguson N
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University, and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2009;74:449-54. doi: 10.1101/sqb.2009.74.050. Epub 2010 May 27.
Financial history is not conventionally thought of in evolutionary terms, but it should be. Traditional ways of thinking about finance, dating back to Hilferding, emphasize the importance of concentration and economies of scale. But these approaches overlook the rich "biodiversity" that characterizes the financial world. They also overlook the role of natural selection. To be sure, natural selection in the financial world is not exactly analogous to the processes first described by Darwin and elaborated on by modern biologists. There is conscious adaptation as well as random mutation. Moreover, there is something resembling "intelligent design" in finance, whereby regulators and legislators act in a quasidivine capacity, putting dinosaurs on life support. The danger is that such interventions in the natural processes of the market may ultimately distort the evolutionary process, by getting in the way of Schumpeter's "creative destruction."
传统上，人们并不从进化的角度来思考金融史，但其实应该这样做。追溯到希法亭，传统的金融思维方式强调集中和规模经济的重要性。但这些方法忽视了构成金融世界丰富的“生物多样性”。它们也忽略了自然选择的作用。诚然，金融世界中的自然选择与达尔文最初描述并由现代生物学家加以阐述的过程并不完全类似。这里既有有意识的适应，也有随机的突变。此外，金融领域存在类似“智能设计”的情况，监管者和立法者以一种类似神的能力行事，让“恐龙”企业得以维持生存。危险在于，这种对市场自然进程的干预最终可能会阻碍熊彼特所说的“创造性破坏”，从而扭曲进化过程。
