The foundational evolutionary traverse of Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter

Almudi, Isabel ; Fatas-Villafranca, Francisco

En : Handbook of Evolutionary Economics
2024
Routledge New York
ISBN: 978-0-3670-2568-7
Pp: 41-68

Resumen: This is an analysis of the wide theoretical context and consequential work of Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter. We assume as a norm for this chapter that we must do an embryological analysis of their texts, and those of contemporary thinkers. We begin by disentangling the avalanche of new ideas in the early individual works of Nelson and Winter. This flow of frames and concepts evolving, and the torrent of new questions that they pose, become interlaced and crystalize during their joint contributions in the 1970s and 1980s. In these decades we can distill the essence and critical development of Nelson and Winter in dialectic opposition with 20th Century standard economics. The advances achieved during the 1990s and 2000s, with new protagonists coming to the front, lead us to the frontier of evolutionary economics. Then, the sudden irruption of the recession in 2008, and the sequence of shocks that have transmuted the global economy during the last decade, have unchained crucial innovations in evolutionary economics that expand the field far beyond the consolidated “beachhead”. The long time span and theoretical perspective of the chapter, allow us to depict a portrait of Nelson and Winter as true masters of economic science