Check out the really cool cover of Nature's special feature on interdisciplinarity!
Of course, as an economist I especially like their inclusion of "Invisible Hand" as the sole superhero representing the social sciences in their scientific team of Avengers. But it is also symbolic for the fact that economists have, in my view, gone the furthest in integrating their discipline with the natural sciences. This holds particularly for environmental and resource economists, who by definition deal with problems of the natural environment like pollution and overfishing. The reason is pretty geeky: most economic research is quantitative, and quite a lot involves the development of mathematical models. And whaddayaknow: so do climate science, population biology, hydrology, and a host of other natural sciences. Give me your equations and I'll plug them into my CGE model.
It is actually much, much harder to truly integrate qualitative social sciences like sociology or anthropology with quantitative sciences - even with a social science like economics. Models like IMAGE and DICE describe the global climate as well as the economy; the Gordon-Schaefer fisheries model and Colin Clark's work on renewable resource use, which use basic models from population biology like logistic growth, are part of the standard canon of resource economics since decades; when Daniel Pauly criticizes the limited impact of the "social sciences" on fisheries research, he lumps together economics with biology, not sociology. Meanwhile, it has taken until 2009 that the Nobel committee finally recognized anthropologist Elinor Ostrom for her contributions to the economics of common pool resources, and economists and sociologists share little but contempt for each others' fields. The Indian economist Jagdish Bhagwati is said to have joked that good economists reincarnate as physicists; wicked economists reincarnate as sociologists. But Ostrom's Nobel also shows that things are changing, especially in the field of institutional economics. Let's have more of that in the future.
Of course, as an economist I especially like their inclusion of "Invisible Hand" as the sole superhero representing the social sciences in their scientific team of Avengers. But it is also symbolic for the fact that economists have, in my view, gone the furthest in integrating their discipline with the natural sciences. This holds particularly for environmental and resource economists, who by definition deal with problems of the natural environment like pollution and overfishing. The reason is pretty geeky: most economic research is quantitative, and quite a lot involves the development of mathematical models. And whaddayaknow: so do climate science, population biology, hydrology, and a host of other natural sciences. Give me your equations and I'll plug them into my CGE model.
It is actually much, much harder to truly integrate qualitative social sciences like sociology or anthropology with quantitative sciences - even with a social science like economics. Models like IMAGE and DICE describe the global climate as well as the economy; the Gordon-Schaefer fisheries model and Colin Clark's work on renewable resource use, which use basic models from population biology like logistic growth, are part of the standard canon of resource economics since decades; when Daniel Pauly criticizes the limited impact of the "social sciences" on fisheries research, he lumps together economics with biology, not sociology. Meanwhile, it has taken until 2009 that the Nobel committee finally recognized anthropologist Elinor Ostrom for her contributions to the economics of common pool resources, and economists and sociologists share little but contempt for each others' fields. The Indian economist Jagdish Bhagwati is said to have joked that good economists reincarnate as physicists; wicked economists reincarnate as sociologists. But Ostrom's Nobel also shows that things are changing, especially in the field of institutional economics. Let's have more of that in the future.
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