Adam Smith and Bacteria

This might be my favorite article of the entire year. Researchers have shown that microbial communities specialize and exchange, just the way Adam Smith described markets in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

An illustration accompanying the article by Jo Craven McGinty in the WSJ gives a good explanation:

It's pretty cool that nature operates on market principles this way as the most efficient utilization of resources, which is what market economists have been saying for a long time. The evidence of this in the human environment is obvious to all but the most dogmatic socialists and anti-capitalists.

McGinty summarizes the study here: 

In their experiment, the researchers documented a tradeoff between the species’ growth and relative abundance in the overall microbial population based on their level of cooperation. The more a community shared, they found, the faster it grew—but the species that shared the most accounted for a smaller fraction of the total population, and eventually the benefit evaporated if the species “overshared.”

At that point, Mr. Tasoff said, it was if the species were giving to charity but gave so much it couldn’t help itself.

“The really interesting key is just because you’re benefiting your trading partner more, in certain instances, it might still be better for you to trade with them,” Mr. Wang said. “You get more of the benefit than if you didn’t trade at all.”

I interpret this to mean that markets work out as sort of a charitable endeavor; i.e., we voluntarily contribute to the well-being of others, and can overdo it.  

One commentator put it this way:

Obviously, what's needed is price controls and centralized oversight on amino acid production!  

In a more serious vein, one should be able to extrapolate that if 'the species that shared the most accounted for a smaller fraction of the total population, and eventually the benefit evaporated if the species “overshared.”' than offering benefits to unlimited numbers of non-working folks, is definitely harmful to the taxpayers.  Intuitively obvious, but perhaps science is needed to convince socialists of that concept.  Or not -- they probably know full well what they are doing.  They are not the ones earning the money distributed in handouts, after all.

Charity and trade are good.  Bleeding dry the Little Red Hen, not.

The original study is here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132907

The abstract is pretty comprehensive:

Abstract

A large fraction of microbial life on earth exists in complex communities where metabolic exchange is vital. Microbes trade essential resources to promote their own growth in an analogous way to countries that exchange goods in modern economic markets. Inspired by these similarities, we developed a framework based on general equilibrium theory (GET) from economics to predict the population dynamics of trading microbial communities. Our biotic GET (BGET) model provides an a priori theory of the growth benefits of microbial trade, yielding several novel insights relevant to understanding microbial ecology and engineering synthetic communities. We find that the economic concept of comparative advantage is a necessary condition for mutualistic trade. Our model suggests that microbial communities can grow faster when species are unable to produce essential resources that are obtained through trade, thereby promoting metabolic specialization and increased intercellular exchange. Furthermore, we find that species engaged in trade exhibit a fundamental tradeoff between growth rate and relative population abundance, and that different environments that put greater pressure on group selection versus individual selection will promote varying strategies along this growth-abundance spectrum. We experimentally tested this tradeoff using a synthetic consortium of Escherichia coli cells and found the results match the predictions of the model. This framework provides a foundation to study natural and engineered microbial communities through a new lens based on economic theories developed over the past century.