Meso Economics and Innovation Implications

Context

Three Post Series On Meso Economics - Post One

Meso Economics has important Innovation roots in the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurs carry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) and that, as a consequence, ‘creative destruction’ leads to economic development ‘from within’ (macro).

Mesoeconomics is a used to describe the study of economic arrangements which are not based either on the microeconomics of buying and selling and supply and demand, nor on the macroeconomic reasoning of aggregate totals of demand, but on the importance of under what structures these forces play out, and how to measure these effects. It dates from the 1980s as several economists began questioning whether there would ever be a bridge between the two main economic paradigms in mainstream economics, without wanting to discard both paradigms in favor of some other basic methodology and paradigm.

Schumpeter Meso Economic – Reader’s Digest Summary


It is argued that Schumpeter paved the way for a new micro–meso–macro framework in economics. Centre stage is meso. Its essential characteristic is bimodality, meaning that one idea (the generic rule) can be physically actualised by many agents (a population). Ideas can relate to others, and, in this way, meso constitutes a structure component of a ‘deep’ invisible macro structure. Equally, the rule actualization process unfolds over time – modelled in the paper as a meso trajectory with three phases of rule origination, selective adoption and retention – and here meso represents a process component of a visible ‘surface’ structure. The universal macro measure with a view to the appropriateness of meso components is generic correspondence. At the level of ideas, its measure is order; at that of actual relative adoption frequencies, it is generic equilibrium. Economic development occurs at the deep level as transition from one generic rule to another, inducing a change of order, and at the surface level as the new rule is adopted, destroying an old equilibrium and establishing a new one.

Sources:
The Origins of Meso Economics Schumpeter's Legacy by
Kurt Dopfer :Max Planck Institute of Economics Evolutionary Economics Group Kahlaische Str. 10 Jena, Germany ftp://papers.econ.mpg.de/evo/discussionpapers/2006-10.pdf