MEMEnomics

The term “vMEME” (the superscript “v” is for “value”) refers to a core value system expressed through a culture’s memes, i.e., its ideas, habits, and cultural preferences and practices that spread from person to person. In MEMEnomics Said E. Dawlabani reframes our economic history and the future of capitalism through the unique prism of a culture’s value systems. Focusing on the long-term effects of economic policies on society, he expands psychologist Clare W. Graves’ concepts of the hierarchical nature of human development and the theories of value systems of Beck and Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics. He presents our economic history in terms of the hierarchy of five of the eight value-systems or vMEMEs of human existence that we can now identify. These new value preferences emerge as people interact with their environment to solve the problems of their “life conditions.”