Two alternative views of an economy are combined and studied. The first view is that of technological evolution as a process of combinatorial innovation. Recently a simple mathematical model (TAP) was introduced to study such a combinatorial process. The second view is that of a network of product transformations forming an autocatalytic set. Autocatalytic (RAF) sets have been studied extensively in the context of chemical reaction networks. Here, we combine the two models (TAP and RAF) and show that they are compatible. In particular, it is shown that product transformation networks resulting from the combinatorial TAP model have a high probability of containing autocatalytic (RAF) sets. We also study the size distribution and robustness of such “economic autocatalytic sets”, and compare our results with those from the chemical context. These initial results strongly support earlier claims that the economy can indeed be seen as an autocatalytic set, and reconcile seemingly opposing views of evolution vs. mutualism in economics.

对经济的两种不同观点进行了结合和研究。第一种观点是将技术进化视为组合创新的过程。最近引入了一个简单的数学模型（TAP）来研究这种组合过程。第二种观点是形成自动催化组的产品转化网络。自催化（RAF）组已在化学反应网络的背景下进行了广泛的研究。在这里，我们结合了两个模型（TAP 和 RAF）并证明它们是兼容的。特别是，结果表明，组合 TAP 模型产生的产品转化网络很有可能包含自催化 (RAF) 集。我们还研究了这种“经济自催化装置”的尺寸分布和鲁棒性，并将我们的结果与化学背景下的结果进行比较。这些初步结果有力地支持了早期的主张，即经济确实可以被视为一个自动催化装置，并调和了经济学中看似对立的进化论与互利共生观点。