Meme Machines

The appearance and disappearance of investment themes over time is a fact of life – remember "you can't lose with the railways"? Me, neither, but in the 1840's it was a guaranteed winner until it wasn't. Other dubious ideas have more legs, like the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the theory that most analysts can figure out which shoe goes on which foot. All of these ideas influence markets and participants and help move prices, sometimes with startling synchronicity. A popular theory of how this happens is based on the idea of the meme, a cultural equivalent of the gene, propagating itself through human brains and influencing group behaviour. So are we meme machines, buying stocks at the whim of transient ideas?

The Selfish Meme

Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme in his book The Selfish Gene in which the gene is imagined as a selfish replicator of itself, using the human body as a way of achieving its sole goal of continued existence. The idea of the selfish gene is a metaphor – genes don't actually behave in mean, grasping and directed ways but the overall effect of natural selection at the genetic level is pretty much the same. By analogy the meme is an equivalent mechanism for spreading cultural ideas, so memes propagate using human brains and have a life of their own. The idea of memes was elaborated into the broader subject of memetics, the study of how memes actually work. There've been lots of popular works covering the subject but the idea is, in fact, curiously hard to get a handle on. At root the memetic approach is an attempt to use Darwin's Big Idea – that evolution occurs through natural selection and random mutation – to culture and thus argues that culture is itself a complex, adaptive system. This is not uncontroversial.

Econbiology and Memetics

However, the attraction for financial scholars is obvious. There's a fair amount of work going on in the world of econobiology which also sees the financial ecosystem as a complex, adaptive system altering itself in response to both changes in its environment – interest rates, central bank liquidity, etc – and it's internal state – securities prices, investor confidence levels, etc. So it's not a particularly surprising leap to find that theorists are interested in seeing whether memetics, a theory…

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