By formal rules I mean laws, and the institutions people can talk about openly. They’re pretty much conscious, and largely designed.

Informal rules are more like, “You’ll have to either bribe a policeman or get a gang’s protection if you want to sell in that market”; and, “The chances of being robbed are such-and-such a function of your prosperity,”; and, “The price of a deer carcass is a short drive in your pick-up, the risk of a cash deal outside the law, and a 0.2% chance of being nicked: it isn’t usefully fungible.”

Consider the situation where the formal ones render everything illegal under some rubric or other, as those in Italy and many worse jurisdictions have been accused of doing. Those are certainly not even designed to have their alleged effect, and the underlying actual rules may be extremely simple conventions of lip-service and light ransom.

I don’t think those are ‘underdeveloped or ambiguous’ rule-sets. I think they’re crummy ones, as highly evolved as any other for their purpose. It’s not enough to have designed ground-rules and take what emerges from the interplay of free agents under them: it’s needful to remember that our attempts to set them have been filtered by the Law of Unintended Consequences, and the rules themselves weren’t ever what we said or thought they were even at the start.

Worth paying attention to and trying to wrangle? Certainly: that’s the whole point of the Cambrian Explosion idea. But the illusion of control over rules and institutions will kill a lot of ventures as surely as the illusion of control through them. Government is really more of a sub-society than a blueprint for one’s actions, and it’s the sort of product where you don’t fully know what you’re selling until you’ve got it.

For me, the Anthropic Principle analogy correctly highlights the importance of rule-based emergent order at one level – but implies way too much rule control at the next. That could be a dangerous habit of thought for would-be architects of Government to get into!

My hope is not that such an idea (“principle”) would be used to wave away arguments analogous ways. Instead, I’d like the reader to pick out the idea that institutions, like the laws of nature, will have a tuning range for the probability certain complex epiphenomena will arise. The relative improbability of the epiphenomena that arise from either domain (cosmology, economics) is of secondary interest, perhaps. And I realize that’s why people invoke the Anthropic Principle in cosmology.

For me, though, thinking about the anthropic principle while it may invert the primary and secondary aspects of interest (as you suggest) — allows us to look in the right places for the rules of self organization in economics. Maybe this makes the Anthropic Principle inapt. I don’t know. My goal for some similar way of thinking would be to change the focus of the discipline away from the current claptrap to the rules that give rise to prosperity. There are fruitful metaphors in biology and ecosystems to be sure, and maybe I’d do better to look there for fodder.

On the other hand, the economic Anthropic Principle you invoke doesn’t seem to do anything like this. If institutions are formed through an evolutionary process, then there’s no need to wave away to address the improbability of their current forms, as you have a whole slew of functional explanations for why things are how they are.

I agree with most of what you’re saying, I just don’t think the Anthropic Principle analogy is well-applied in this case.