The economics of utopia: a co-evolutionary model of ideas, citizenship and socio-political change

We propose a new history-friendly approach to evolutionary socio-economic dynamics based around competition between five ‘utopias’ as central ideas about which to order society: capitalism, socialism, civil liberty, nature, and nationalism. In our model, citizens contribute economic resources to support their preferred utopia, and societal dynamics are explained as a co-evolutionary process between these competing utopias. We apply the model to analyze certain aspects of socio-economic and political change in the US from the 1960s–present. We carry out a history-friendly analysis inspired by such episodes as the outbreak of civil movements in the 1970s, the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, and the channels through which America has engendered an ‘age of fracture’. Further applications for empirical and theoretical research are suggested.