Let us for a moment suppose that the engineering arts can engage economic principles to create robust and satisfying models of economic systems such as those visible among creatures in the natural world; and, further, that there are no longer any practical limits to the detail and complexity of such models. The possibilities of economics as hard science would then come down a question of the appropriateness of such naturally-occurring systems as analogs to human societies. This question is anything but unique to economics: every science is at peril with regard to misapplication of its generalities, especially by extension into realms where application is harmful.

Respecting Professor Simon’s admonition, mechanistic theories of macroeconomics can only be expected to account for observations made from a rather distant perspective on the material order, i.e.: one in which anthropology becomes indistinguishable from entomology; where two people haggling over the price of a refrigerator would be operationally the same as two ants exchanging pheromones. From the standpoint of modulating overall performance in the hive, prices are not distinguishable from other pheromones — one information-carrying particle being as serviceable as any other from the standpoint of asset valuation.

Such a perspective is neither rare nor necessarily perverse in relation to human affairs. Insurance companies are vital to a capitalistic system; but, from the standpoint of their analyses, the individual hardly exists — ‘just one more potato in the bin’ being the industry’s term of art. It might also be observed that mankind’s culture, no less than his manufacturing technique, is constituted by collective knowledge of which no individual can know more than a fragment. Who among us is singularly equipped to construct a modern dwelling, or design an industrial process, or institute a system of belief? The mystery to be penetrated by economic science is one of how the dilute matters of intelligence upholding material order come to be coordinated in an efficient system.

Here again the problem for theoretical materialism is hardly unique: every mechanistic theory is limited to a determination of events within some sort of system boundary; and describing the boundary is a universal requisite of applied science. It is properly observed that a capitalist macro economy is only possible within the context provided by culture. In the wild, humankind would likely be limited to troops of a few score individuals; and, in a state of nature, any capital accumulation would be gobbled-up by the nearest gangster as soon as it formed. Freely-transacted commerce among billions of individuals via the artificial pheromone of value requires an inherently lawful population with the police powers to enforce contracts, punish coercion, and limit fraud — none of which are evident in nature.

Ultimately the burden here is the same for all science: upon observing order, the scientist requires explanation. General tendencies for markets to clear, return rates to unify, leisure to expand, etc., are not sensibly regarded as accidents. Rather, they are indicia of an underlying order that is only understood as the outcome of systematic behavior, which is the only sensible object of understanding.

Hopefully this line of thought is now sufficient to conclude that Homo Economicus, insofar as he is immersed in macro phenomena, need not be regarded as an indeterminate being. Positing indeterminacy in our subject should not, in any case have ever excused economists from stating their theories in mathematically determined fashion. All subject matter is ultimately indeterminant; but this in no way prevents a theory’s behaviors from being mathematically determined. Indeterminate theories simply have no behaviors that might be analogized to the actual behaviors observed out there in the material world, and thereby admit no possibility of falsification.