Things like mental and physical health, addictions and substance use, thought manipulation and mind control, the fears and desires, sexual fantasies, even popular movies and music affect the economy greatly.
Not just a little bit, but greatly. A CEO's addiction to cocaine or promiscuity will have an impact on his company's bottom line. A young man starts a disrupting startup because he got inspired by a sci-fi movie a couple of years earlier.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is "invisible" because those forces can't be explained by the mechanistic rules of economics or mathematics. We just need to look elsewhere for a comprehensive picture.
What makes customers choose a product over the other ? Why do some companies retain great talent better than others - and hence reap greater profits ? How does pop music affect industrial design ?
Of course, human behavior and psychology is hard to quantify, that is why it's being left out, but I think we can start to make these connections now that we have the tools and information available.
Take Google and Facebook - these companies make their profits from advertising. Tens of billions. Add the profits of the media market - print, tv, radio.
Now consider how all that advertising affects the demand curve in all the other industries.
And it's not just the quantity, it's also the quality of advertising - today's ads are scientifically designed to drill their way into our subconsciousness. The colors, the sounds, the motions, the emotions - all of these are carefully weighted so as just to make you want a certain brand over the other.
And now my favorite part - is there a connection between advertising, corporate profits, pollution and climate change ?
I think there is and it's a great one. To conclude, I think regulators should look at all these factors much deeper, determine the connection between mind and economy and exercise their influence by tuning other parts of society, not just traditional economic levers.
Of course this is a monumental task for humans, but AI might just be perfectly suited for this type of analyses.