A New Principles of Economics

CHAPTER NINEInstitutions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094869-13

1. Introduction

Institutions are key to understanding cultural evolution. Institutions are the defining feature of making humans ultra-social; it is institutions that enable and maintain extremely complex and diversified cooperative specialisation via the formation of networks that today have achieved global scale. On markets, institutions are crucial for defining economic agency, agential powers, and the mediation of transactions.

See Chapter 4, section 4.2, and Chapter 8, section 3.3.

In analysing institutions, we need to distinguish clearly between the behavioural patterns as such and the generating forces.¹ Both elements are included in the term ‘institution’, which has resulted ...