Funny, then, how many animals perform trades in nature.
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I suppose that you are going to claim that suckerfish, dung beetles and birds that eat bugs off off rhinos are somehow God's First Capitalists.
The world's richest packrat would only be worthy of an article if he collected things humans might regard as valuable: shiny buttons, beer poptabs, wedding rings or coins. A packrat far from humans with a forty pound collection of bone fragments, seedpods and shiny pebbles would not even make it into the National Geographic except as a has-been.
Economics is a social science in the same way psychology is a social science. This is largely because we do not understand its many complications.
Perhaps someday, we can manipulate genes so that no one ever suffers from dyslexia, mongolism, autism and such.
Perhaps someday we can eliminate greed, obsessive competitiveness, aggression and other antisocial behaviors as well. We could cause people to be more compassionate and altruistic by fiddling with their genes.
Locking up psychopaths for life is in the long run less productive to all concerned, so eventually some societies will seek to prevent psychopaths through genetics.
Putting autistic children in mainstream classes or locking them up forever is more like witch doctoring than education. Putting psychopaths in jail is the same sort of thing.
To the extent that we can cure mental disease through genetic manipulation, is is also likely that the key to a more satisfactory economic system could be developed in the same way.
Whether we do this seems dependent on how long it takes before an errant comet or asteroid takes us all out.
