Is economics a natural science?

Social Research, Summer, 2004 by Julie A. Nelson

Third, science-with-wonder adds particular insight to the issues of human relationships with the rest of the natural world. An Enlightenment approach, of course, would state this as "human relationships with the natural world" since humans in that view are portrayed as somehow apart and above our bodies--divinely or romantically blessed with a gift of reason and consciousness found, presumably, nowhere else in nature. Science-with-wonder does not deny the existence of our amazing capacity for consciousness, but grounds this as part of a continuum of processes of nature, rather than portraying it as a hard wall separating us from nature. There is an incredible hubris in science-without-wonder approaches that see human inventiveness and technological advance as the way to solve environmental problems. "It doesn't really matter how much we deplete the ozone or warm up the climate," such reasoning suggests, "because we have faith that in the future we will be able to think our way out of any problem we create now." There is also a rather scary variety of wonder-without-science that suggests that ecological collapse is part of an inescapable divine plan for end times salvation, and therefore also need not be prevented (C. Keller, 1996). To the extent we, first, separate mind from matter (or spirit from matter) and, second, then identify with mind (or spirit), the result is that matter appears to be not particularly relevant, or at least not particularly our responsibility. (2)

CONCLUSION

Heilbroner at one point has appealed to "our capacity to form a collective bond of identity with ... future generations" as a way to inspire us to avert environmental catastrophe (1974: 115). I would like to suggest that we need, as well, to further develop our capacity to identify ourselves as integrally a part of nature. We need to leave behind the notion of ourselves as minds (or spirits) somehow above and apart from nature, and see ecological concerns as very much our affair, and very much our own responsibility. To do this, the notion of science as the study of mechanism must be left behind. The study of social behavior, including economic behavior, must become "naturalized" (in the simultaneously "miraculous" sense).

Economics is, in short, a natural science. A biologist in awe at the complexity of a coral reef is unlikely to carelessly toss his or her Styrofoam cup into the ocean. One can hope that economists who are able, though deep and careful observation and open minds, to develop a sense of awe at the complexity of the interplay of human social organization with the bodily basis of existence, will be similarly inspired to protect and preserve it.

NOTES

(1.) This sense of the world being composed of processes rather than substances was important, for example, in the American Pragmatist philosophy of William James and John Dewey in the early twentieth century. While most of their work was confined to applying this insight to the social sphere, the early-twentieth-century philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the contemporary physics of Ilya Prigogine and Isabel Stengers (1997) extend it to the physical dimension as well. For more on application of these insights to economics, see Nelson (2003a).