Теория Дарвина превратила больших боссов в динозавров

Darwin's theory turned bosses into dinosaurs

There's a case for saying that the credit crunch is all down to Charles Darwin.

Keynes wrote: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist."

Now, technically Darwin is a defunct biologist rather than political philosopher or economist. But his interest in economics was keen, and equally keenly reciprocated. One perceptive interpreter of On the Origin of Species, 150 years old this year, saw it as "the application of economics to biology". As the crowning expression of Victorian individualism, continental writers argue, the theory of natural selection, with its underlying theme of competition and struggle, could only have originated in the laissez-faire England of the period.

Bastardised and coarsened, the concept of "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase only later adopted by Darwin from Herbert Spencer) has powerfully shaped modern business. The robber barons of the early 20th century quickly latched on to the self-serving idea that "might is right" - cut-throat economic competition was the normal state of affairs and the rise to the top of the strongest was part of natural law and the inevitable outcome of history.

This mentality persists, especially in the US, and indeed the idea of the inevitability, and desirability, of individual struggle in weeding out the strong from the weak is what distinguishes Anglo-American from Rhine capitalism. It perfectly informs the ethos of the financial sector over the last two decades, as well as the rise of the Russian oligarchs and the development of the virulent Chinese strain of capitalist competition.

Darwinism endows such phenomena with a veneer of scientific rationale. Republican senators' reluctance to intervene to prolong the lives of US banks; the chilling belief of City traders in their own superiority, as uncovered in interviews by the Guardian's Polly Toynbee and David Walker; the self-justifying arguments in favour of stratospheric pay rises for chief executives and cutbacks for the less fortunate - all have uncomfortable echoes of the crude social Darwinism that influenced not only the robber barons but also the far greater 20th-century monsters, Hitler and Stalin.