Paradigms are about the relation of thought to change; how we might come to think otherwise. At the present time, societies around the world seem rather stuck in their thinking. Data, even the evidence of our own eyes, and in some cases burnt hands and wet feet, do not seem to carry much weight when it comes to thinking differently. Kuhn was clear that paradigms are resilient - rather more so than our ecosystems it would appear! Scientific communities do not reject dominant paradigms just because there is evidence against them. Kuhn’s initial training in physics should have inclined him toward the view that scientists change their minds when the evidence changes. Instead, he argued that scientists do not change their world views until a series of crises force them to do so and/or a ready alternative paradigm has arrived to take the place of the old.
Kuhn’s insight was that ‘normal science’ actually works against falsification because it is embedded in the ordinary day-to-day activities and processes of the scientists. Radicalism it would seem requires less rationality and more value adaptation and emotional responsiveness. No doubt, this explains economics’ reluctance to abandon its reigning orthodoxies even in the teeth of evidential failures. Economic theories, like economists themselves, are embedded in existing social relations and power structures, and there are many forces ranged against movements for change. Shared understandings are key to social co-operation and scientists are not the only people we have to consider.
It has often been suggested that human societies, like their scientists, have a default setting hard wired to deflect uncertainty, a preference for forms of understanding that reprise existing certainties and maintain social relations. Certain historical periods have fostered more change than others, but what has come as a shock is the undoubtedly swift turn against scientific and social progress ushered in in recent years. Many commentators, communities and citizens around the world were expecting the 21st century to confirm the progress of the late 20th and to accelerate a series of transformations – social, environmental, economic – that could attend to the crises of resource, relationships and regeneration that have brought humanity into sharp dissonance with its own uncertain future. Contrary to expectations, a rolling back of climate policy and environmental regulation, a doubling down on extractive growth, a retaliatory tariff policy linked to international relations and global trade, coupled with land grabbing and unprecedented levels of violence and arbitrary reprisals have been the response. If human knowledge is progressive, it can also be regressive. If the goal of the new paradigm is a unified science of cultural evolution then this immediately raises the question are sure we know how cultural evolution works, and if we do are we sure we know how to intervene in the processes involved in a way that will drive prosocial outcomes?
Who wants to act?
In a 21st century dominated by multiple intersecting crises and uncertainty, there is increasing recognition that new social, economic and environmental paradigms are urgently required to tackle the challenges of climate change, inequality, and environmental degradation, and to create the conditions for more prosperous and sustainable futures. But, orthodox economics is both a resilient and a capacious paradigm, largely because it is strangely resistant to real world events and dynamics. Its relationship to history and culture has always been impoverished with many instances of disruptive theories, data and methods ruled irrelevant to the prevailing model(s) and simply swept aside. The inconvenience of the messy world could not be allowed to stand in the way of a physics of society with its neat economic predictions. Ideas shape the world we live in and economics has had a clear interest in shaping and remaking the world to be more like its own models.
Models have consequences, and their adherents have vested interests. It is not just the power of rationalising agents with barely a tangential relation to actual humans or the clarity of a model of human behaviour without ideology or politics, but the relationship between economic theories, incumbent governments, elites and their access to power and money. Paradigms are not immune to ideologies, and research projects and systems not as resistant to power and money as they might be. The industrial progress of the nineteenth and twentieth century – as David Sloane Wilson points out – found practical resonance with a mechanistic view of the world, based on levers and extraction, that imagined the world as coterminous with and built out of the bits and pieces of our most sophisticated machines, intent on harnessing nature for human purposes. The current turn to complexity, systems, non-linear dynamics and emergent properties is necessary and most welcome, but it is not easily translated into the practical applications of governments and businesses still far more attuned to pulling levers, acting on the world rather than in collaboration or coordination with it. The powerful contra response to transitioning away from fossil fuels and adopting a more regenerative, resilient approach to human and planetary well-being is buoyed up by emotional, psychological and financial responses that drive the desire for continuation of existing models of extraction. These psychosocial responses draw powerfully on proven mechanistic models of economic growth, and the majority of government and business elites have yet to demonstrate any sustained desire to retreat from established ways of managing economies and businesses.
The temptations of power and privilege are clear, but beyond that lie established practices for managing business and government that have yet to concede or even imagine any alternative to the growth narrative. Those working in government and business can be likened to kuhn’s scientists upholding the ‘normalised science’ which respects rather than overturns their experience of the world. In consequence, any alternatives seem both ideologically and experientially implausible: the world just doesn’t work that way. Even those who are concerned about poverty and the planet gravitate towards such frameworks as inclusive growth and resilient economies; strategies designed to keep the dominant paradigm afloat. David Sloane Wilson is correct that a new paradigm is urgently needed but the actions of scientists will not be enough to bring it into being nor to direct it towards purposive and progressive action
From a more positive point of view, modern societies are plural and diverse, and governments and business are not the only groups relevant to the success of the practical application of a new paradigm. Civil society organisations, community groups and citizens/residents also have a key role to play and here attitudes to new economic approaches and policy innovation are arguably more positive globally precisely because of people’s experiences of what is happening in the world around them. For example, in a recent survey in Kenya, 97% of respondents believe climate change is already affecting their everyday lives; 76% believe it has negatively affected their livelihood; and 81% say that renewable energy should be prioritised. Another survey reported that a clear majority of respondents in industrialised nations support a just transition accompanied by compensation for lower income countries affected by climate change.
However, the desire for change is not clear cut or unidirectional. Over 75% of the UK population worry about climate change, but 50% of those questioned thought that policy responses would increase their living expenses. For citizens/residents, the issue frequently is will the government take any action, and beyond that will the necessary actions further erode or threaten already fragile livelihoods, and will they be just? In the Earth4All global survey in 2024, 2 out of 3 people across the G20 said that the global economic system needed complete reform or major change. At the present time trust in government and elites is at a very low ebb, especially in situations of high inequality and low citizen voice. Under conditions of increasing uncertainty, insularity is actually growing as a response to differences in culture, values and lifestyle. So the picture is a mixed one, but many people around the world do want change and might well be interested in taking effective action at a local level. Existing research shows that when residents help design solutions, they are more likely to support and champion them.
Bringing people into local decision making is a proven way of co-designing and delivering innovation, but it’s important to start with processes that speak directly to everyday experiences and frame engagement around place and quality of life. Difference between places means that one size doesn’t fit all, and generalised calls for GDP growth, productivity improvement and inclusive growth continue to ring hollow and not just because they remain elusive, but because we have so little idea how to create them in context. The problem with orthodox economics is not just that it is founded on the rational, maximising individual, but that it seeks to provide a template – a series of concepts, models and frameworks – that should be applied to all and should function according to invariant laws. There are many confusions of scale here because the fact that we all live our lives in the context of the invariant laws of the universe is not actually a reason for believing that contemporary economics has understood the physics of society at a national, leave alone local, level. The circumstances and contexts of human lives are diverse.
How does cultural evolution work today?
Humans have evolved to be culturally diverse. Cognitive diversity is key to our prosociality and its success. Cognitive styles are cultural and change over time, but they do not evolve towards homogeneity, despite globalisation. Humanity may be prosocial, but prosociality is diverse. This is not a problem in itself, since to design a better world we could just work with our different ways of being prosocial. An approach, I happen to agree with. However, being prosocial – the ability to conceive of it, design it, act on it – depends on value alignment and across contexts values are unlikely to align. Again, this is not necessarily an impediment. The fact that Singapore runs government to citizen consultation in a rather different manner and for rather different purposes from the UK could be easily negotiated at a higher level of prosocial co-operation – the United Nations, for example – and alignment could focus on agreed sets of values and social goals that do not necessarily have to overlap completely.
There are a number of existing frameworks for explaining cultural evolution, but one pertinent question is whether they are well adapted to the contemporary world and its distributions of power and resource? As David Sloane Wilson has reminded us, complex adaptive systems based on the adaptive strategies of individuals (CAS2) do not always evolve into group level adaptation systems (CAS 1), and indeed can even undermine such adaptation. Cultural multilevel selection theory provides the potential for variation at all levels with selection occurring at different levels of organisation as a function of context, and consequently evolutionary pressures operate on multiple scales simultaneously. This means that context is key and that both prosocial activities and prosociality itself are context derived and dependent. With regard to prosociality, the question of whether large scale evolutionary patterns are the result of smaller scale changes in populations still has to be empirically examined and especially for large scale contemporary societies.
In the existing literature, cultural dynamics like co-operation, resource conservation, economic institutions and various norms and practices can be shown to emerge in response to ecological and environmental pressures. Cultural evolution is faster than genetic evolution and so prosociality confers further advantages on groups who are able to deploy it. Group selection is the integrating framework underpinning such work, and since altruism outperforms selfishness at the inter group level, culture becomes functionally related to outcomes which can go on then to confer further advantages. From this perspective, prosociality is evolutionarily advantageous. When applied to archaeological, historical and small scale societies, arguments based on co-operative agreement, co-ordination and knowledge sharing for improved outcomes around pressing issues, such as water allocation, are quite convincing. When it comes to discussions of contemporary farming responding to tax rises or today’s agricultural research stations functioning as a form of evolutionary pressure, then arguments for cultural evolution seem more farfetched or rather the specific value of the concept is more threadbare and elusive. Responding to changes in pricing and cost structures in the 21st century is not exactly innovative, and culture is rather more than the transmission of information or knowledge with incentives thrown in.
What seems clearer is that purpose driven variation (innovation) through prosociality can confer results. Examples of this would include citizen assemblies creating innovation, legislative panels guiding improved outcomes for citizens, labour unions driving improved working conditions etc. But again, what is hard to discern in these cases is what role culture or adaptation plays except in very general terms. Although, encouraging and motivating communities and groups at all levels to improve life conditions for others and deliver valued social outcomes is very much to be desired. Where guided purpose driven interventions are of particular value is in understanding what social innovations are necessary to drive whole system transformation across intersecting social, environmental and economic systems. Developing a whole system approach to problem formation, design and delivery is key. The Food, Farming, and Countryside Commission in the UK, for example, has held a series of innovative citizen-led food conversations on how to drive systemic change across the UK’s food system, with the results being integrated into the work of the relevant government department via the establishment of a citizen advisory council. What is invaluable here is the combination of whole system learning with directed design for preferred social outcomes at intersecting scales, both local and national.
A new economic paradigm
A prosocial economics could potentially harness ideas about whole system transformation for improved livelihoods and ally them to new forms of social solidarity via co-design, action learning, and mutual trust to drive systemic change for improved human and planetary flourishing. But it would need to do so in a way that respected the diversity and pluralism of all living systems, including socio-cultural ones, in situ. For citizens/residents context is key: will this work for us here, now? The issue of context dependency for prosociality means that in modern plural societies there would be no guarantee that the preoccupations of lower-level groups would always align with those of neighbouring or higher-level groups.
Its not just that value pluralism exists, and that groups might disagree, but that they are in active competition over versions of the good life. A functioning economy under a prosocial paradigm would be a socially connected one, it would also be ecologically regenerative. These features are the enablers of the good life. The good life is diverse, variably defined, historically changing and culturally embedded. A prosocial economy requires an integration of social, economic and ecological goals with an attendant theory of ends which require forms of value alignment to achieve. The difficulty in the contemporary moment is that groups are divided over the science and the truth that underpins these very propositions. Scientists are at work on both sides.
Its not just that value alignment is challenging under conditions of competing truth claims: does climate change exist? But that key value propositions have competing interpretations. These include such terms as justice, sustainability, resilience, fairness. Beyond that key terms used to describe features of a shared life world are also increasingly contentious, including climate, ecology, environment and the economy. Just consider that President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, and again in 2025 citing unfair burdens on the US economy and impact on GDP. Deciding in favour of national economies over the future of the planet is one that many are prepared to make. Modern societies are not just diverse, but divisive. Group boundaries and group sentiments under such conditions are extremely strong. Prosociality, understood as concerted action for the betterment of the group, is also extremely strong. Prosociality understood as acting in the interests of human and planetary flourishing, however, is a value alignment, and risks being rejected by groups who take competing views.
Any new economic paradigm will have to engage all sectors of society across the globe. Taking publics along with the new direction will require more than scientific excellence on the one hand and citizen co-design and motivation on the other, as David Sloane Wilson recognises. So where might we begin? Beyond any integration of complex systems, evolutionary theory and citizen-led co-design, we need to work up a series of experimental, locally based innovations that create measurable improvements for groups/populations. We will need new metrics too that citizens can use to measure impact. Different science disciplines and government departments in various countries are already employing complex systems thinking and whole system transformation to focus on positive tipping points, and on the specific interventions necessary to create cascading benefits across multiple systems. We need to develop a more powerful set of positive examples of interventions deploying a series of tipping points that drive change across socio-economic-ecological systems in ways that deliver improved quality of life for all involved. To do this we will need massive experimental innovation on a scale that human societies have not seen before and that will take considerable cultural innovation, adaptation and evolution.
