David Sloan Wilson — Corporate Ecosystems Are Filled with Predators and Parasites

A bedrock assumption of economics is that firms become well adapted by competing against each other. If so, then consider a study that I reported upon earlier, which monitored the survival of 136 firms starting from the time they initiated their public offering on the US Stock Market. Five years later, the survivors—by a wide margin—were the firms that did best by their employees.

If only the fittest firms survive, then doing well by employees would have become the prevailing business practice a long time ago. That hasn’t happened, so something is wrong with the simple idea that best business practices evolve by between-firm selection. That “something” is multilevel selection, which is well known to evolutionary biologists and needs to become better known among economists and the business community.

Multilevel selection theory is based on the fact that competition can take place at all levels of a multi-tier hierarchy of units—not only among firms, but also among individuals and subunits within firms. The practices that evolve (culturally in addition to genetically) by lower-level selection are often cancerous for the welfare of the higher-level unit. By the same token, if selection did operate exclusively at the level of firms, then the outcome would often be cancerous for the multi-firm economy. When it comes to the cancerous effects of lower-level selection, there is no invisible hand to save the day.

The kind of firm selection imagined by economists, along with the invisible hand assumption that lower-level selection is robustly beneficial for the higher-level common good, would be called “naïve group selectionism” by evolutionary biologists. Its biological counterpart was roundly criticized during the 1960’s and has had a half century to mature. Modern multilevel selection theory is not naïve and has much to teach the economics profession and business community.

This is the topic of my interview with Lynn Stout, who knows a thing or two about firms. She is Distinguished Professor of Corporate and Business Law at the Cornell Law School and author of Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People and The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public.….

Evonomics
Don’t Be Fooled. Corporate Ecosystems Are Filled with Predators and Parasites
David S. Wilson |SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo