Free growth then arrives at its whim, like a deus ex machina, without calling for

Free growth then arrives at its whim, like a deus ex machina, without calling for more than this steady effort of replication. I find myself focusing more and more on that cash flow component of rate of return, or pure consumption rate at the collective scale, as the part we can predict and model. The generation length is a biological norm which probably has not varied by more than a factor of two since Ancestral Eve some 200,000 year ago. This suggests that next generation theory can be tested against data from any period. Meanwhile it predicts only at the collective scale. Collective return is average risk return. Subtract collective growth rate to leave cash flow rate. Return and growth are two of the most closely measured rates in economics. That says that tests of next generation theory should be practical. I will show tables broadly in support. Next generation theory is a blockbuster. An explanation of interest and return has been the Holy Grail of capital theory. Boehm Bawerk contributed a big advance by revealing return as an artifact of time preference rather than the other way around. Some including Irving Fisher have seen that beautiful insight as enough. Not me. What explains and quantifies time preference? What turned out to be Petty’s idea occurred to me about 40 years ago, when I first took an interest in evolutionary biology. My friend Alan Rogers, a population geneticist | didn’t know all the time, was thinking in the same direction. His two published papers on this are in my appendix. Neither of us knew about Petty’s priority. The idea would have been a still bigger blockbuster before the wall came down. Wars were being fought about whether return has any legitimacy at all. Karl Marx, ironically a champion of Petty, may have missed his argument on that. Petty’s idea is really the biological imperative I discussed in Chapter 1. The first priority is survival and reproduction. I will argue that this was implicitly accepted Chapter 2: Fast Forward 1/06/16 29 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010969