[ianai]

If we didn’t know the rules of chess or go and merely watched the games of various skill levels might we come up with something similar? Eventually we’d get the rules, I think.

But with people and money there are few rules written down and even the goals of the decision makers are as varied as the decision makers themselves. The things used to facilitate trade themselves vary over time and nature.

Probably why Econ theory tends to better characterized as Econ philosophy. It might need/probably has to be studied with something like science but modified to be able to study the phenomena of scarce resource allocation.