The Evolutionary Political Economy of Climate Change: Utopia Competition

Abstract

We present a new evolutionary political economy approach to the study of long-run dynamics of socio-economic evolution and change based on a co-evolutionary model of differential citizen contributions to competing ‘utopias’ – market, statism, and environmentalism. We model the transition to a sustainable economy as an (plausible) outcome of ‘utopia competition’ in which environmentalism manages to coexist with market, while state fundamentalism vanishes. Our simulation-based framework suggests that the contributions of citizens to the battle of ideas – both the distribution within a utopia, and the interaction between different utopias – are crucial factors in explaining the dynamics of the transition to a sustainable economy.