What drives market capitalism?
For evolutionary economists, market capitalismby which we mean a set of institutions relating to the exchange of property rightsis at heart an experimentally organised process of competitive rivalry, driven by the discovery of new ideas and ways of doing things. For evolutionary economists, the concept of competition does not mean a large number of identical firms in a market for a homogeneous good. Rather, it means that someone is looking at a particular way of doing things and speculating that they could do it better, or, perhaps, that they could do something that would make it unnecessary to do what was being done in the first place. Competitive or entrepreneurial actions create new knowledge and/or destroy old knowledge, and the marketthe democracy of economic agentsdecides whether or not it is a good idea. People are motivated by private gain, but if they succeed, then it becomes a public gain: an old problem is better solved, or a new problem is solved. This is what entrepreneurs
