The Consilient Brain: The Bioneurological Basis of Economics, Society, and Politics

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Springer Science & Business Media, 2004 - Business & Economics - 234 pages
The present work is the third in a series constituting an extension of my doctoral thesis done at Stanford in the early 1970s. Like the earlier works, The Reciprocal Modular Brain in Economics and Politics, Shaping the Rational and Moral Basis of Organization, Exchange, and Choice (Kluwer AcademicfPlenum Publishing, 1999) and Toward Consilience: The Bioneurological Basis of Behavior, Thought, Experience, and Language (Kluwer AcademicfPlenum Publishing, 2000), it may also be considered to respond to the call for consilience by Edward O. Wilson. I agree with Wilson that there is a pressing need in the sciences today for the unification of the social with the natural sciences. I consider the present work to proceed from the perspective of behavioral ecology, specifically a subfield which I choose to call interpersonal behavioral ecology. Ecology, as a general field, has emerged in the last quarter of the 20th century as a major theme of concern as we have become increasingly aware that we must preserve the planet whose limited resources we share with all other earthly creatures. Interpersonal behavioral ecology, however, focuses not on the physical environment, but upon our social environment. It concerns our interpersonal behavioral interactions at all levels, from simple dyadic one-to-one personal interactions to our larger, even global, social, economic, and political interactions.

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Contents

Introduction
1
The Maslow Hierarchy of Needs vs MacLeans Triune Brain
7
The Conflicts Systems Neurobehavioral Model
15
The GlobalState Algorithms of Reciprocal Behavior
23
The Dynamic Equation of Our Neural Architecture
29
The Homeostatic Regulation of Our Social Neural Architecture
33
The Question of Science Physics vs Social
37
Reciprocity and the Evolution of the Market
43
Institutions Organizations and Reciprocity
103
The New Institutional Economics Williamson and Transaction Cost Economics
109
The New Institutional Economics Williamson and Transaction Cost Economics
117
Evolutions Science and Society
127
Inclusive Social Fitness and Evolutionary Neuroscience
135
The Neural Dynamic Exchange and Social Structure
139
The Neural Dynamic and Our Political Choices
149
Global Politices Reciprocity and the CSN Model
159

The Misrepresentation of Admam Smith
49
The Natural Foundations of the Invisible Hand
57
The Natural Basis of General Equilibrium Theory
63
Friedrich Hayek and Wishful Thinking
67
Neural Architecture and Price Theory
73
SelfInterest and the SelfReferences Fallacy
79
Neural Architecture and the Market Calculus
83
The Neural Dynamic in Equilibrium Modeling
87
Political Economy The Neural Dynamic and Scarcity
95
The COncept of Justice
167
Our Moral Consciousness
173
The CSN Model vs the Maslow Hierarchy
181
Conclusion
187
The Mismeasure of MacLean
195
A New Paradigm for Thinking about Global Economics and Politics
209
References
213
Index
227
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