The neoliberal economist Gordon Tullock shared his admiration for Wilson’s “excellent” book. Tullock’s own foray into “bioeconomic theory,” The Economics of Non-Human Societies, argued that economic modeling could help explain how nonhuman animals like ants managed complex social coordination without central planning. “Social insects and other social species normally only have an economy, but no government,” Tullock wrote. “Humans think that government is a necessary precondition for the function of the economy, thus this proposition may seem bizarre.” This was precisely the premise that the most radical neoliberals sought to use sociobiology to question.
government as regulation of social trading/economies?