This View of Life
Magazine

Why a new economy needs cultural evolution, local action and a break from old orthodoxies

Today’s overlapping crises point to one deeper problem: the breakdown of collective performance

Research across cultures suggests that family care and support may help explain why same-sex sexuality has endured throughout human history.

Paradigms are lived symbolic systems shaping identity, culture, institutions and ecology — transforming them is key to long-term human and planetary flourishing.

Relational agency shows how cooperation and collective action emerge from mutually reinforcing interactions, no altruism or central control required.

Greater diversity and feminist critique has helped uncover overlooked biology and shift evolutionary theory in important ways.

Economic theories endure because they make the world feel coherent, even when inaccurate — understanding this explains why paradigm change is hard.

A new economic paradigm must be an interlocking set of ideas about what people are and what organizing is for, or it will be absorbed into the old profit-first worldview.

Evolution is being rethought as a web shaped by genes, environments, culture and co-operation.

A genuinely new paradigm must pair evolution and complexity with purpose-driven, testable interventions that help societies 'evolve on purpose' toward explicit values.

The complexity–evolution paradigm explains systems well but needs a stronger ethical and institutional framework to guide effective action.

Social science paradigms don’t just explain society — they shape it, acting as selection environments for institutions and behavior