Is consciousness necessarily being implied here? That sort of reflective decision making can be indirectly influenced by what we might consider economics, but economics is fundamentally a process of allocating scarce resources across non-scarce desires. Markets represent a form of collective intelligence, even without necessarily representing sentience.

Individual families making rational economic decisions about child-rearing costs, when aggregated across millions of families, could produce patterns that look like species-level decision-making without requiring any actual species-level consciousness.