Selective Death Rate

The same thought that had occurred to Charles Darwin ten years earlier occurred to Alfred Russel Wallace recovering from a bout of malaria on an Indonesian island. Each had been considering Malthus’ theory that population growth would always exceed growth in food supply, dooming many to death. Both had the same question, “Which ones will die?” and both came up with the same answer, “The ones least able to live.”

They presented together the notion that evolution proceeds by a selective death rate. Those least equipped to survive and to breed would die off at a higher rate than those better equipped, leading to the development of new species that incorporated the innovation that improved their chances.

A similar selective death rate operates, when it is allowed to, in a market economy. Innovations occur in products, services and organization, and the most successful ones survive at the expense of those less well equipped to compete with them. In market economies, flux, rather than stasis, is the norm. Few of the companies in the top hundred remain there for decades as technological change combines with changing tastes to erode their market share.

Existing firms often use political clout to make life difficult for newcomers, using regulation to raise costs and barriers against new entrants. This is not the free market at work, but the use of legislative influence to thwart its operation. The coach operators lobbied Parliament to insist that the new motor cars must be preceded by a man on foot with a red flag. Progress, growth and consumer satisfaction are maximized when a selective death rate is allowed to cull the businesses that can no longer survive on merit.

Innovations which increase productivity and growth lead to job losses. It is the way of the world. Those job losses are resisted by political representatives more anxious to secure the support of present voters than to make life better for future ones. But countries prosper more if they allow that selective death rate to operate instead of trying to resist its effect by subsidies and trade barriers to protect extant businesses at the expense of future ones.

Sir Karl Popper made the famous observation that the aim of politics is not to select the wisest and best rulers, but to ensure “that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage.” In other words, the advantage of democracy is not that it allows the people to rule, but that it can apply a selective death rate to political ideas and their exponents. It enables failed rulers to be changed peacefully and to allow alternative ones to be given a chance. Because politicians in a democracy know they can be called to account at the next election, their behaviour is tempered. No such restraints are there to curb the behaviour of despots.

The methodology is a selective death date, as it is in evolution and free market economics. It is less efficient in the political realm because popular will is not as brutal as it is in nature or a free economy. The same failed ideas can resurface no matter how many times they have sunk in the past. This is because some ideas appeal in theory even if the real world discredits them repeatedly.

In scientific method, new theories are put forward and tested by experiment and observation. Those that are less successful at predicting what we shall observe are discarded in favour of those that do this more successfully.

A selective death rate operates by trial and error. In evolution it is blind, but in market economics, politics and scientific method it is purposive. But in all these areas it is by counting out the less adequate in favour of the more adequate that development and change take place. To interfere with this process is to mitigate its benefits.