Satisficing in economy

The main goal of the rationality process is optimizing, or to achieve the best solution possible, but in an information-rich world, where time is a constraint and the resources to get there are limited, selecting the best option from a sea of infinite options is a gargantuan task. Knowing this, why is economy based on the principle that humans always maximize their benefit when common sense says that they don't?

Economy is a science that involves humans as the main driving force, as opposed to physics or chemistry where natural concepts are involved. A rock does not decide to fall, it just does. A human might decide to buy or not to buy something. Economy also involve quantities, instead of qualities like the rest of the social sciences that study human qualities (even in quantitative studies, numbers are used to study qualities of something or someone). So Economy stands in an awkward place: for it to be a science it needs to abstract its main driving force: human behavior. But to abstract human behavior and model it, as we have learned so far, is a complex task.

Basic economic theory avoids complications and is based around the premise that humans act rationally or, what is the same maximize their benefits whenever they can. For a science that is so significant in our days, that statement is a huge leap of faith. Economists might argue that more complex economic theories address constraints and information gaps and therefore, model the decision making scenario more correctly. But, still, that's the issue.

When physicists and chemists model chemical reactions or heat transference, they model processes that are governed by strict and stable properties. Outcomes vary from a thread of connecting causes, and scientists’ ability to predict them is always limited. But when they model a process they know the effect that each introduced variable produces on the outcome and while they might fail to account for some undetected variable and predict wrongly, there's causality in the model: for example, in heat transference, if one increases the heat flow and everything else remains constant, the temperature will rise. In economy, that causality does not necessarily exist: if a person has to choose between two options and one is more attractive, does not mean it will be chosen. We can increase the attractiveness and it still might not get chosen. We can even decrease the attractiveness and it could be now chosen. There are ways to predict behavior, but they are not infallible.

Is it okay, then, to base economy in the concept of optimizing? Could optimizing be the underlying reason behind exponential growth and the overexploitation of Earth's natural resources? Have we, in our continuous search of optimums, spent unnecessary amounts of resources when we have probably needed less?

H.A. Simon defines the concept of satisficing as settling for a satisfactory solution instead of seeking the best one. Do you think an economy of satisficing instead of one of optimizing is what we need for a resource limited future?