Last week I praised the essay "The Other Invisible Hand" (The Other Invisible Hand), by my intellectual friend Jag Bhalla, on how good biology accompanies good economics. The best biology comes from Darwin, of course, and Darwin was inspired by economics. He was reading Malthus and it occurred to him that the same adaptations for the survival of human populations could be applied more generally. He needed a mechanism to justify his controversial theory that species were not created by God, all at once, but evolved. Trial and error in the relentless pursuit of prosperity was the answer. And it's good economics too; better, in fact, than the main modern alternative, which Jag and I reject. The alternative is to assume that the economy is an input-output machine that is maximized by... who? In the old theistic view, by God. In the modern view and of social engineering, by the economist and the politician. But evolution doesn't work like that, from top to bottom. It works from the bottom up. A species of bird from the Galápagos Islands does better if its beak is more efficient at picking up a particular type of fruit. The most efficient beak "happens" by trial and error, not by the bird or an avian economist maximizing it "rationally." That's how it is in the economy. Most innovations are unsuccessful. But in the normal course of things, failures are soon replaced by other attempts, until one succeeds. Physicists and inventors have known for decades that forcing electrical current through a filament could produce light. They tried and tried. So Edison did it. True, he tried to make money, like a supposed selfish gene. But none of "us" were managing the economy in which Edison worked, setting aside common politeness and contract law. The economy as a whole, just like ecology as a whole, or the Portuguese language as a whole, or your individual life as a whole, is trial and error. The economy and ecology are not input and output machines. How did you meet your spouse? That's what I thought: randomly, right? But my friend Jag concludes that recognizing good biology "will require a complete revision of the regulation-rejecting reflexes of free-marketeers." Wait one moment. "Regulation" in biology has evolved, as Jag correctly emphasizes, over millions of years, from the bottom up. But the “regulations” he advocates for the economy — rent control, central banking, trade protectionism, subsidies for privileged groups — “evolve” in ten seconds of top-down thinking, say, in the mind of Donald Trump. "We must explicitly protect our...vehicles of survival: communities, cities, nations, reaching across the entire planetary biosphere," says Jag. Wait one moment. The "we" is not the wisdom of evolution, but the ideas of the current herd of independent minds. To assume that, for example, antitrust laws against Amazon are a good idea is to assume that pro-State economists got the theory right and that intelligent regulation will be applied by altruistic and virtuous politicians. I've been saying that many economists don't get the theory right, and you know that most politicians are not altruistic and virtuous. Columns Receive a selection of Folha columns in your email LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.