This chapter focuses on the connection between economic adaptation and economic development and growth. It argues that economic adaptation is inseparable from the growth of knowledge, and that market based dynamics give adaptation a form that is central to change in modern capitalism. Reallocation of resources is the consequence of different beliefs; the imagination that the economic world can be organized differently. This is the primary reason why economies evolve and adapt, in that they are instituted variation, selection, and developmental processes.
Keywords: economic adaptation, economic development, economic growth, knowledge, complex knowledge system, evolutionary economics