Free Will: Hail and Farewell
This essay traces the evolution of the free will concept, from Plato to the present.It examines interpretations offered by theologians, political philosophers, philosophers of mind and consciousness, neuroscientists, evolutionists, legal scholars, and economists. The essay illuminates the concept’s instrumental use as an artifice for manipulating behavioral adaptations to the scarcity of economic resources. Macroeconomic and ngram data reveal these manipulations as having locked Western civilization into centuries of social and economic stagnation.