Dumbing down Darwin: Robert Frank's effort to explain the lessons of evolution without offending libertarian sensibilities.

• Author: Galbraith, James K.
• Position: The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good - Book review

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good

by Robert H. Frank

Princeton University Press, 256 pp.

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In today's economics department the libertarian holds a place comparable to that of Maoists among antiwar protestors back in the 1970s: a fringe group, yet admired (by some) for dedication and clarity--the purs et durs, in the French phrase. Libertarians take individualism to its limits, they count on markets to set prices generating actions that lead to happiness, they would drown government in a bathtub, and they do not care if some people are homeless. Theirs is the appeal, in one word, of the fanatic.

Cornell economics professor and New York Times columnist Robert Frank, on the other hand, is a moderate. He favors law and regulation, and he believes that government must play an important role in building and maintaining infrastructure and social insurance. He believes that once upon a time there was wide agreement on these points, and he regrets that America has decayed as this agreement fractured. Frank is also the most distinguished scholar of rank and hierarchy in academic economics; he takes the libertarians seriously, and The Darwin Economy is his extended conversation with the libertarian mind.

What's the matter with the libertarian view? Frank thinks that Charles Darwin came up with the first and best answer: what is good for the individual is often bad for the group. Overweight elephant seals and over-antlered bull elk gain preferential sexual access and pass on their genes, but this comes at the cost of being less able to escape predators. Natural selection works against the wider propagation of the species. In hockey, players gain a small advantage from not using helmets, but if no one uses one, the advantages cancel and all are worse off. Given a vote, therefore, rational hockey players favor a helmet requirement. In economic life, myriad taxes and regulations work the same way: it may benefit a single business to break the rules, but if the rules are removed no one is better off and if they are respected no one is hurt.

To Frank the force of this insight is such that he favors Darwin over Adam Smith's "invisible hand," taking that notion to be the core of libertarian belief. The invisible hand is widely thought to be Smith's apotheosis of free markets, which posits that unfettered markets are capable of being inherently fair. Although this is a considerable overstatement and Frank is...