I've often thought that the economics profession could do with more cross pollination with biology. Modeling the economy as a living ecosystem with, for example, a network of parasites and symbiotes would be more illuminating than the default neoclassical mode that almost treats it like a sanitized gaseous system where you turn a dial labeled "interest rates".
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of conceptual overlap between parasitic/symbiotic organisms and economic relationships, too. E.g. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing happens all the time in scamming ecosystems:
>Often, in an effort to travel between host animals, parasites will expose their hosts to new predators, like the tapeworm Ligula intestinalis, which grows so large it changes the buoyancy of the fish it inhabits, causing the fish to swim closer to the surface and get eaten by birds.
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of conceptual overlap between parasitic/symbiotic organisms and economic relationships, too. E.g. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing happens all the time in scamming ecosystems:
>Often, in an effort to travel between host animals, parasites will expose their hosts to new predators, like the tapeworm Ligula intestinalis, which grows so large it changes the buoyancy of the fish it inhabits, causing the fish to swim closer to the surface and get eaten by birds.