All of these are spontaneous self-starting processes. When we look at “evolution” we know to look at the many types of species and their evolutionary relationships, in today’s view, genetic phylogeny. When we look at “ecosystems” we know to look at the patterns of species diversity and distribution. So they are not the same viewpoint, but they are made up of the same things. When we look at economies, I am willing to bet most people do not separate the two major aspects of the economies — the range or diversity of types of economies and their evolutionary relationships derived over very long periods of time and in addition the patterns of economic species diversity and distribution in a region.

Natural evolution has no ultimate goal, no defined milestones, no direction, and no purpose. The results of evolution are on-going rudderless experiments. Each element in the experiment has only two major objectives, survive and reproduce. Organisms respond to the entire range of conditions that make up their environment. Natural selection is a blind tool choosing those genes that allow individuals to survive and reproduce best. Only one species would exist were it not for naturally occurring variation. Diverse conditions lead to diverse species. While there is no natural management of evolution, there are well-known examples of artificially managed evolution. The technique is not to manage the variables that produce selection pressures on entire systems, but instead to have a pre-determined goal derived from one existing species. So far it has only been done by holding captive a very few organisms of a single species at a time and selecting naturally occurring variants that suit the definition of the goal. Dogs ranging from Great Danes to Chihuahuas, cats from Manx to Persian, goldfish from the Black More to Telescope Eyes, all were artificially evolved by selective breeding. Many “domesticated” plants that are common on the dinner table are the result of artificial evolution. None of these artificial species intentionally is used to manage evolution as a process. And in fact, most of the artificial species would not survive well in a natural system. However, the artificial selection process is many many times faster than natural selection, and can be made to operate in less than the span of a person’s lifetime. The results are still technically within the same species, but they are recognized as “breeds” if they consistently reproduce the same characteristics.

A natural ecosystem also has no ultimate goal, no defined milestones, no direction, and no purpose. What we observe is the same individuals striving to live and reproduce, but this time the selective pressure is in the context of a short span of time, too short to operate on genes. Instead the pressures operate on the individuals themselves. The frame of reference is both a different time span and a view of the system. The view includes but is not focused on the individual species. The emphasis is on the pattern of the system as a whole. To manage and ecosystem, unlike the management of evolution, the entire system is adjusted and tweaked. To date, human efforts to manage an ecosystem has succeeded only marginally well, and those successes are mostly by excluding non-natural resources. Most efforts to create a more productive region have been agricultural. In these cases, the mechanism is to remove the competing species and allow only one or a few species to live together. The resulting mono-cultures are much more productive for that species, but the severe reduction in species diversity means artificial techniques must be used to sustain the system’s raw materials and physical conditions.

How about managing the economy? Well, the results so far anywhere in the world have not been very impressive.

Let’s start with evolution. There are examples of types of economic species, genera, families, and classes (lucrespecies, lucregenera, lucrefamilies, lucreclasses) that have lasted thousands of years — an evolutionary observation. These lucrespecies have given rise to others over thousands of years. But they have all arisen essentially spontaneously, innovations derived from the inventiveness of entrepreneurs finding different products to sell. The first car inventor ultimately was the common ancestor of the car lucrespecies, made up of hundreds of companies (lucrebeings) that make and sell cars. Nobody designed the concept of a car industry, it just happened. Is it possible to create an artificial breed of the car lucrespecies? Think about creating an artificial species of pigeon. A person manipulated the genetic structure of the pigeon by selective breeding. Is there a mechanism that could do this? Perhaps it is possible to produce a “breed” of the car lucrespecies. It would still be a car lucrespecies but might be highly modified to suit a particular goal. A government might nationalize a company and set a goal for all the cars from this company to be run on hydrogen and have fur covering, but not tell the car company about the goal. Any car that came closer to this ideal would be kept, any car not demonstrating a tendency to one of these characteristics would be scrapped. Over time, the new breed of car might not look much like a car, but they would have been derived from the original car, and would ultimately have fur and run on hydrogen. Just as with the artificial breeds of dogs, cats, goldfish, and pigeons, the furry hydrogen-breathing car might not actually do very well in the normal economy. A supremely rich person might try the same thing and sell the resulting cars as a novelty — just as happens with pigeons.

Next let’s consider the ecological model of economies.