> "Supply and Demand" is a law of nature
It's a law of human nature. Value is inherently subjective, which makes deriving it from natural laws conditional upon a physical explanation for humanity.
> "Supply and Demand" is a law of nature
It's a law of human nature. Value is inherently subjective, which makes deriving it from natural laws conditional upon a physical explanation for humanity.
Ecologists have been studying how groups of animals deal with famines, natural disasters, loss of habitat, climate change, etc for many years. These conditions change supply and demand on resources that are out of those animal populations control. Studying cooperation in bacteria colonies from a similar lens was pretty hot in academia in the late 2010s from what I remember.
Each animal defines value differently (heck, different groups of different people define value differently). A half-eaten sandwich thrown on the street is trash to you, but a jackpot for your local crow. The crow has no interest in the housing market though.
Value is partly subjective but all value eventually can tied to the reversal of entropy. And the reversal of entropy costs energy.
It is naive to think the topic is wholly subjective. Subjectivity is one aspect of value but not only does the subjectivity coincidentally correlate with entropy reversal… but entropy reversal is also intrinsic to all value as even a human being alive and assigning value to something carries an energy cost. This cost is non trivial as it takes a lot for you to live and a lot more to have the luxury to think in terms of value.
A lot of other models closely resemble economics:
- Computational systems, distributed systems, and operating system theory model resources and demand. They often attribute a cost to units of space, time, or compute based on availability.
- Ecological systems very closely model economics with respect to predator-prey dynamics.
- There are so many systems in biology that resemble economics. Evolutionary systems often increase gene dosage over generations in order to meet demand for gene products: polyploidity in plants, gene duplication, promoter amplification, etc. There are then also suppressive measures taken when deleterious effects arise. The balance of telomerase, etc. Within a living organism, there are the dynamics of apoptosis and proliferation pathways to follow the developmental program, to avoid disease states, etc. And then there are the biochemical flux of metabolites, etc.