Economics’ first argument against the possibility for a hard material science has had countless formulations. One of the most succinct was provided by the late Herbert Simon (who was no less an authority on economics than on the mathematics of complex systems):

The reason that this is not a science is that the subjects of our study think.

Consider a colony of leaf-cutter ants from the standpoint of its economic organization. This tiny animal produces a considerable hierarchy of intermediate products: leaves are harvested, reduced to progressively smaller dimensions, and eventually refined into a sort of compost in which there grows a certain fungus that the ants finally consume. These operations are supported by auxiliary functions including the removal of exhausted composting material, a specialized military, the creation of more ants, etc.

In all, a hypothetical zoological economist should be able to identify a half dozen or so interlocking industrial sectors at work in the ant colony, with each exhibiting its own vocational specialty. Observing the placement of resources among these sectors, the economist could certainly infer the relative value of each commodity produced and the utility of each vocation. And these data would theoretically disclose the shapes of each sector’s production function, their amounts of capitalization, and, ultimately, the entomological rate of return on investment.

While the individual ant does not think, she manifestly is a node in what can only be regarded as a thought process. The ant colony is a meta-mind that senses its needs and its resources, and somehow generates the collective awareness needed to control the intricately coordinated activities by which an efficient combination of working assets and vocational specialists is continuously maintained. These observations would suggest that the adjudication of value is a naturally occurring phenomenon — one that was pressing down, like gravity, on all creatures great and small long before there evolved a being sufficiently vain to marvel at his paltry contemplative abilities.

If all that prevents the economist from modeling a human hive is the individual’s interested self-awareness, then he should have no difficulty creating quantitatively specific models of lesser beings continuously re-optimizing their assets in response to external stimuli. As notice of any such models being accepted into economic science has escaped SFEcon, we presume that a general engineering/dynamic model of autopoietic economic adjustment would be both novel and worth considering as an effective analog to humanity’s economic activities.