Is capitalism motivated by a fantasy of total control? Or has the biological metaphor of capitalism as an evolving system, previously used to excuse abuse in the virulence of social Darwinism, found a new vitality, as it were, in the idea of economies as dynamical systems?
Some economic concepts informed by these dynamic or biological concepts include " virtual corporations" producing "just in time" goods and services by net-driven "flex factories" on demand. In a networked economy, companies are distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive.
There are a number of "ecologies" operating in these conceptual convergences. For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union serves as an example of the superiority of the " bottom up" approach over the " top down" workings of the "command economy". Even the "invisible hand" of the market resurfaces as an " emergent phenomenon."
Because the boundaries between the living and the artificial have become porous, adaptibility in both living and non-living systems can be directly compared, and market economies are now thought of as able to learn, as responsive, and as perhaps having attractors, albeit chaotic ones. Doyne Farmer, for example, one of the original pioneers of the chaos cabal, is involved in stockmarket prediction. He believes that there is a "flip side" to the long-term unpredictibility of chaos (see sensitivity to initial conditions) which are moments of short-term predictibility, which he is trying to identify.
"Industrial Ecology" (a concept put forward by Hardin Tibbs)