From David Brooks:
They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
Rather the wrong way around, for of course economics has always been (at least trying) to resemble social life.
As James Scott noted in “Seeing Like a State”, modelers tend to change their subject of study to be more like their models.