The first linked op/ed piece states that capitalism is at fault for our unsustainable world, as these 'invisible hand' of capitalism is as stupid as the 'invisible hand' of evolution that created the behavior of lemmings. The invisible hand of evolution not only created lemming behavior but also the potential for enlightened human behavior; however, the Buddha found that realizing the human potential for enlightenment requires following a 'middle path'. Therefore, I provide the second linked article about how a 'new invisible hand' (based on updated evolutionary theories) can allow technocrats to nudge modern socio-economic systems from global capitalism to a more sustain socio-economic system by following a middle path between laisse faire and central planning:
Title: "The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid"
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/climate-capitalism-crisis.htmlExtract: "The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It’s capitalism that is at fault."
…
The claim here is not that unintelligent people do not do unintelligent things, but rather that the overwhelming unintelligence involved in keeping the engines of production roaring when they are making the planet increasingly uninhabitable cannot be pinned on specific people. It is the system as a whole that is at issue, and every time we pick out bumbling morons to lament or fresh-faced geniuses to praise is a missed opportunity to see plainly the necessity of structural change.
Put differently, the hope that we can empower intelligent people to positions where they can design the perfect set of regulations, or that we can rely on scientists to take the carbon out of the atmosphere and engineer sources of renewable energy, serves to cover over the simple fact that the work of saving the planet is political, not technical. We have a much better chance of making it past the 22nd century if environmental regulations are designed by a team of people with no formal education in a democratic socialist society than we do if they are made by a team of the most esteemed scientific luminaries in a capitalist society. The intelligence of the brightest people around is no match for the rampant stupidity of capitalism.
&
Title: "Why New Economics Needs a New Invisible Hand"
http://evonomics.com/the-new-invisible-hand-david-sloan-wilson/Extract: "The New Invisible Hand suggests the existence of a middle path.
…
The old concept pretends that the pursuit of individual or corporate self-interest robustly benefits the common good, as if “led by an invisible hand” in the words of Adam Smith. This is also the essence of the term “laissez-faire”, which is French for “leave it alone”. Nobody believes that an economy can truly be a free for all—certainly not Adam Smith, who invoked his metaphor only three times in the entire corpus of his work. A fuller reading reveals that he was amply aware of the need to regulate economies. Nevertheless, those who have made the invisible hand their central metaphor regard laissez faire as by far the better path to take than its alternative—centralized planning.
I am not the first person to declare this notion of the invisible hand dead, but my grounds for doing so are somewhat novel. Evolutionary theory makes it crystal clear that the unregulated pursuit of self-interest is often toxic for the common good. This conclusion becomes especially strong when we conceptualize self-interest in relative rather than absolute terms, a distinction that separates much evolutionary thinking from much economic thinking. When we absorb the fact that “life is graded on a curve” as the evolutionary economist Robert Frank puts it, then we can see that nearly all cooperative efforts require time, energy, and risk on the part of the cooperative individuals that place them at a relative disadvantage compared to less cooperative individuals within the same group.
The same theory that delivers the death stroke to the old concept of the invisible hand also provides a strong foundation for the new one. The two elements of the invisible hand metaphor are: 1) A social system works well; 2) without its members having the welfare of the system in mind. Nature is replete with examples, such as eusocial insect colonies and multicellular organisms as societies of cells. The members of these societies work harmoniously for the common good without even having minds in the human sense of the word. In each case, the first element of the invisible hand metaphor is satisfied because the society is the primary unit of selection—colony-level selection in the case of eusocial insects and organism-level selection in the case of multicellular organisms. The second element is satisfied because higher-level selection winnowed a small set of lower-level behaviors that contribute to the common good from the much larger set of lower-level behaviors that would disrupt the common good. In short, higher-level selection is the invisible hand. When it doesn’t occur, then disruptive forms of selection among individuals within groups take over, such as cancers in multicellular organisms and varying forms of cheating behaviors in eusocial insect colonies.
One of the great discoveries of evolutionary science during the last few decades is that this theoretical framework, called multilevel selection theory, can be applied to the evolution of our own species–including our genetic evolution primarily at the scale of small groups, our cultural evolution at successively larger scales during the last 10,000 years, and the rapid changes swirling all around us today that we are trying to influence with our policy decisions.
…
The main take-home message is easy for anyone to understand. We must learn to function in two capacities: As designers of large-scale social systems and as participants in the social systems that we design. As participants, we don’t need to have the welfare of the whole system in mind, but as designers we do. There is no way around it. Anything short will result in social dysfunction.
This is a definitive refutation of laissez-faire as a perspective for formulating policy, but it is not an endorsement of centralized planning. Indeed, the main import of the New Invisible Hand is to suggest the existence of a middle path, a way to design social systems that is itself evolutionary and iterative, resulting in regulatory processes that look like laissez-faire, even though they never would have come into existence on their own.
…
In short, the middle path between laissez-faire and centralized planning has been discovered many times, as might be expected from a cultural evolutionary perspective—but that isn’t good enough. Each discovery originates as a cultural “mutation’, often by happenstance, and spreads on the basis of its success to a degree, but then remains confined within certain cultural boundaries and is largely unknown outside its borders—somewhat like the geographical distribution of a biological species. What’s needed is a way to transcend these cultural boundaries so that all of the examples can be related to each other and understood from a unified theoretical perspective provided by a combination of evolutionary theory and complex systems theory."