EACH month when the state reveals its latest economic performance indicators, analysts eagerly interpret them, deciding if this is the time for congratulations or for condolences.

Recently two Chinese officials were imprisoned for leaking such indicators before they were announced, at a cost.

In many advanced economies, the latest economic figures could easily dictate who will be the next president.

An important fact eluding many of us is: In what ways are these numbers important to an average citizen?

In his "The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good" (Princeton University Press, 2011), economist and New York Times columnist Robert Frank tries to explore the relation between competition and the common good.

Frank's conclusion is that Charles Darwin's evolution describes economic reality far better than Adam Smith's "invisible hand."

That could have profound consequences on our understanding of the nature of economy, prompting us to consider whether we should stop making much fuss about GDP, and pay more attention to CPI - whether it stands for Consumer Price Index or Corruption Perception Index.

Unfortunately, many decision makers have failed to identify - not to say grapple with - genuinely urgent problems today, resulting in ignorance-driven political paralysis.

One manifest sign is the surge of optimism at the smallest increment in consumption, compared with pervasive indifference to issues like global warming and receding snow line - problems any rational political process should address with dispatch.

Adam Smith did believe self-interested actions often led to socially benign outcomes: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

What is less known is that he qualified that conclusion. He also wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

And Frank adds that "competition was much more easily restrained in Smith's day than it is now."

Today we are confronted daily with blatant cases of market failures, the latest being the Wall Street financial meltdown, and the subsequent bailouts of investment bankers.

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are trying to express their anger with the situation.

To Smith, market failures stemmed from attempts to suppress competition, while Frank believes that market failures are rooted in the very logic of the competitive process itself.

This process finds better explanation in Darwin's evolution.

One of Darwin's central principles is that natural selection favors traits and behaviors primarily according to their effect on individuals, not larger groups.

Competition can sometimes create "arms races," encouraging behaviors that can cause enormous harm not only to the group, but to individuals as well for the long term.

The author illustrates this arms race by citing the natural selection process that encourages the bull elk to grow larger and larger antlers in order to win access to females.

These enormous horns, by impeding mobility in the forest, make the elks easier prey for predators, favoring neither the individuals nor the group.

Then Frank compares these elk to parents vying with each other in paying higher and higher costs to send their children to better schools, resulting in a situation in which everyone will end up poorer and less happy.

This result can be generally expected of unbridled competition today.

As a matter of fact, unfettered competition can be more damaging to human society because the homo sapiens is so good at practicing fraud and deception.

For instance, when retailing giants Carrefour and Walmart first entered China, they were generally perceived to be welcome sources of a broad array of consumer goods at ever cheaper prices.

But as soon as these giants had eliminated most of their smaller rivals by undercutting them, they began to extort huge profits by raising prices and limiting choices.

In the worst cases, they simply overcharge, or palm off fakes to their captive consumers.

They have become such powerful monopolies that they can dictate terms not only to consumers, but also to their suppliers and manufacturers.

Elusive solutions

Frank carries on the evolutionary metaphor by deliberating on the wasteful positional goods, which pressure people to live in bigger houses, throw lavish parties, and show off their latest LV bags.

Such behavior benefits neither the individuals nor the group.

Frank proposes that the best way to control harmful behaviors is not to prohibit but to tax them.

"When we tax pollution, for instance, polluters with the cheapest ways to reduce emissions rush to adopt them, thereby avoiding the tax," Frank observes.

The problem with Frank's solution is that we live in a world where it is often cheaper for factory owners to pay the taxes and fines than install emissions-cutting technologies, or cheaper to outsource the polluting work to "emerging" economies.

The issue is, Earth is finite.

The author's confidence in our nearing a perfectly informed, frictionless ideal market can also be questioned.

As we can see, the free flow of information in cyberspace is often subject to control of invisible hands, and information overload often distracts people from the real issues or makes them dull.

Any analysis of our economic reality would not go far if it fails to grasp the essence of consumption.

As the latest hype over Apple gadgets suggest, owning some consumer products has become something like a spiritual quest.

Such perceptions are carefully managed. In late John Kenneth Galbraith's observations, powerful corporations first decide which products would be most convenient and profitable for them to produce, and then hire Madison Avenue hucksters to persuade consumers to want those products.

Such perceptions naturally exclude the million of laborers working long hours for subsistence wages in factories that supply Apple.

To quote Marx, greater division and specialization of labor "mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage to a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into hated toil."

Market faith

In the philosophy of today's politicians and economists, sweatshop toil would be much sweetened by laborers fantasizing about owning an iPad or iPhone one day.

In this context, taxing the item would make it pricier, and like a LV handbag, being pricier makes it more sought after.

If we compare the outsized antlers of bull elk with human consumption today, it becomes easy to see that while those enormous antlers do not lead to extinction of the elks, consumerism is endangering the whole planet.

Given such hazards, government regulation is certainly necessary, but that intervention should move beyond the narrow economic context in order to address fundamental human weakness: greed.

The generous economic stimulus carried out in the wake of the recent financial crisis clearly represents another case of privatizing gains and socializing the losses. Frank points to an imperfect understanding of how competition works, but a more important job is to redefine justice and common good as something outside of the context of consumption.