The Economic Law of Autonomous Needs

This paper proposes the Economic Law of Autonomous Needs, a law-like framework in the tradition of institutional political economy. The framework identifies a recurring pattern observable across multiple technological transitions and economic systems: human needs frequently emerge through decentralised adaptation, imagination, and experimentation before centralised institutions exist to recognise or govern them; private actors tend to respond through autonomous investment; and as these systems gain social indispensability, institutional intervention — while often delivering genuine welfare improvements — also tends to expand regulatory leverage, manage dependency, and consolidate administrative control. The paper introduces three analytical principles to explain the mechanisms within this pattern. The Doctrine of Non-Mix argues that welfare functions and control-expansion functions within institutional interventions are analytically distinct and should be studied separately. The Autonomy Severance Principle identifies how institutional instruments applied through wrong causal diagnosis tend to suppress autonomous investment without resolving the original problem. The Induced Investment Dependency Principle proposes that follow-on private investment depends causally on the visible success of autonomous investment and tends to contract when that trigger is institutionally blocked. The framework is applied to five historical cases — electricity, central banking, currency and energy systems, solar energy, and artificial intelligence — with explicit recognition that cases vary in the strength of evidence they provide. The paper acknowledges counterexamples, states boundary conditions, and specifies what evidence would weaken the framework. The paper invites editors, scholars, and intellectuals to refine the framework further through stronger case studies and broader comparative testing, with the aim of clarifying how autonomous needs generate autonomous investment and how autonomous investment can subsequently induce further investment within changing institutional environments. This framework identifies a recurring institutional pattern rather than a universal historical law. Keywords: autonomous needs; autonomous investment; induced investment; institutional political economy; Doctrine of Non-Mix; Magical Fiction; state intervention; innovation; AI governance; regulatory leverage, Arif Jameel. Zenodo Publication DOI 1) The Diella Doctrine — Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20289985 2) Architect Generation — Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20312472 3) The Ethical Passport Theory (EPT) — Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20106107 4) The Jameel Doctrine: Humanity by Ethics — Domination by Power — Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20097490 5) Jameel Binary Philosophy — Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20475982