viability

EE eschews standard >equilibrium concepts and introduces viability as the alternative standard. Viability is a non-equilibrium phenomenon of stability in change, such that first, structure is reproduced in time and second, change of >structure maintains structural interconnectedness in the course of time. For example, a technology is viable if it there is an unbroken chain of applications in time and if the variants of the technology lie within the scope of the base technology. Thus, viability is closely related to the stability of the internal selection process in the >VSR-mechanism. Loss of viability results from the external selection of structures of internal selection, resulting in a non-incremental change of the evolutionary path. Analytical difficulties result from the fact that in non-linear dynamics radical changes can result from endogenous incremental changes (as analyzed in catastrophe theory).

In economic systems, viability can be defined empirically as absence of fundamental crises that would affect the order of the system. For example, crisis and deregulation in a particular sector of the economy do not imply loss of viability of the entire system, but a large-scale crisis like the slow-down of the planned economies and the final transformation do.

Viability is an evolutionary concept and does not lend intself to prognosis. Empirically it can only be used for ex post explanations, whereas forecasting future developments would need to understand the complex dynamics of change and to include all the possible impacts of future events. Given the complex time structure of economic systems, this is impossible to achieve.

Basic References

The concept of viability is borrowed from French regulation theory. For a survey, see
Agnès Labrousse/Jean-Daniel Weisz, , eds. Institutional Economics in France and Germany. German Ordoliberalism and the French Regulation School. Berlin et al.: Springer, 2000.

Semantic Field
system