Synthetics and trade/econ techs

I'll apologize in advance for what I'm sure is a stupid question.  I just bought the game a few days ago after reading about Crusades, and I'm trying to figure things out.

Is it intended that synthetics not have access to most trade and econ techs?  Maybe I'm just missing them, but I can't find them manually searching the tree.  When I search the tech tree for "trade," a bunch of trade-related techs pop up, but when I click on any of them, they're not in the tree.  The same is true for "bank" and "econ."

If this is intended, why?  How do I improve my revenue?

Thanks.