Are Ducks good economist [poll]

Question

lets look at the history of human kind, and see if we find the traces of governance first and economy as an outcome of that governance. I Looked at archeology and found that we only accept evidence based theories in academia about human history, but the problem is the most logical things usually do not survive as archeological evidence, example it is obvious that the first paper used was animal skin to write, but you won't find any as evidence, because it will not survive the withering of time. Its obvious because that is the first paper in existence that human will harvest for clothing hence obvious they will also draw on it or write on it. Kids even today if left alone will start chalking on the walls instead of the books they already have. Why because it is in our blood, walls like stones are also obvious places to leave written history or just scribble, hence only validating human history based on archeological facts contains many logical gaps. For example obviously art can not be proto survival. Language can not be proto mathematics. These are obvious facts, because survival requires collaboration, collaboration requires math and math requires writing and drawing, but writing do not require language. Hence writing is proto language. If I was to propose this in academia as a theory of obviousness, people will laugh at me, but if you were to simply imagine yourself in the shoes of a caveman you will see these were the obvious steps a specie will take before it will get to language. A duck may not be able to count but knows how many chicks she has. How? if one is missing she will eventually notice and look for the missing one.

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Answer 1

I think there is an interesting economic question buried underneath your post, although I would be careful about drawing historical conclusions from what seems intuitively obvious. Many of the claims about the sequence of writing, language, governance, and mathematics are ultimately empirical questions that archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science continue to investigate.

That said, one aspect of your argument resonates with a behavioral-economic framework I have been developing, the Productive Value-Productive Power (PV-PP) framework.

One of the framework’s assumptions is that economics should not begin with money, markets, or even governments. It begins with exchange. More specifically, it begins with exchanges that increase or decrease the future productive capacity of the participants.

Viewed that way, information is not merely something that affects markets through information asymmetry. Information is itself a productive asset that can be exchanged. Teaching another person where water can be found, how to make a tool, how to recognize poisonous plants, or how to cooperate during a hunt all increase the recipient’s future productive capacity. Those exchanges are economically meaningful even though no money changes hands.

From that perspective, I suspect the earliest human “economy” consisted primarily of repeated exchanges of goods, services, skills, and information within small groups. Formal institutions such as money, contracts, taxation, and governments would have emerged much later as mechanisms for organizing increasingly complex exchanges rather than as the origin of economic behavior itself.

Regarding the duck example, I think it illustrates something slightly different. A duck recognizing that one duckling is missing demonstrates information processing and environmental awareness. Whether that should be described as economic reasoning is a separate question. Economic behavior generally begins when an organism changes its actions based on expected future outcomes and exchanges resources, effort, or information with others.

In short, I agree with the broader intuition that information is more fundamental than many economic models explicitly acknowledge. Where I would be more cautious is in inferring the historical order in which language, writing, mathematics, governance, and other institutions necessarily evolved. Those are fascinating questions, but they require evidence beyond what appears logically obvious.