Just stumbled on an old econ paper specifically about this topic: Alchian’s “Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory”. I came to it via this essay on Alchian, which mentions that a lot of Alchian’s material was just standard thinking from the pre-WWII era which was forgotten by the more macro-focused Keynesian economics paradigm (which dominated from roughly WWII until the Lucas Critique). Through that lens, it’s kind of surprising that people haven’t revisited economic selection pressure much in the context of modern microfoundations—most current work on microfoundations still assumes rational utility-maximizing agents. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some interesting theory to be discovered there, although it would probably require building a very different mathematical foundation from what’s currently used.
Just stumbled on an old econ paper specifically about this topic: Alchian’s “Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory”. I came to it via this essay on Alchian, which mentions that a lot of Alchian’s material was just standard thinking from the pre-WWII era which was forgotten by the more macro-focused Keynesian economics paradigm (which dominated from roughly WWII until the Lucas Critique). Through that lens, it’s kind of surprising that people haven’t revisited economic selection pressure much in the context of modern microfoundations—most current work on microfoundations still assumes rational utility-maximizing agents. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some interesting theory to be discovered there, although it would probably require building a very different mathematical foundation from what’s currently used.