TITLE:
The Economics of Nature: Constrained Dynamic Optimization and Efficient Decentralized Decision Making in Nature
AUTHORS:
Jong Soue You
KEYWORDS:
Dynamic Optimization, Decentralized Decision Making, Economic Efficiency, Economic Natural Selection
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.13 No.2,
April
14,
2023
ABSTRACT: The paper suggests that the study of economics as
being practised in the economics profession today is needlessly human centered.
Evidence is presented that the driving force behind activities of all living
organisms including humans is economic in nature. Their behaviors are driven by
the objective of constrained dynamic optimization, i.e., that they behave
rationally. Further, whenever large-scale groups are formed such as colonies of
ants and bees, and trees of the forest, they resort to decentralized decision
making to obtain efficiency. The evidence for this proposition is rooted in a
wide range of observations on the behaviors of many plants and animals and
indeed in how their genome is organized and functions. Recent research suggests
that the origin of life itself had the
underlying motive that was economic in nature, i.e., that life was not a chance
occurrence but an inevitable outcome of energy-dissipation-driven
organization of the matters behaving so as to maximize the economic efficiency
along the evolutionary path of increasing entropy production. Further,
observations on a wide range of natural phenomena, including straight-line
path of sunlight, symmetry of snowflakes and crystals, lead us to believe that
it is not just living organisms that behave rationally but inorganic matters as
well rationally in the sense that they behave with the objective of constrained
dynamic optimization that produces efficient outcome.