The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics

Abstract

H ow long will researchers working in adjoining fields...abstain from expressing serious concern about the splendid isolation in which academic economics now finds itself?" Wassily Leontief, Nobel laureate in economics, asked almost two decades ago (Leontief 1982, p. 104). The question is extremely important, because economics is the foundation on which most decisions affecting agriculture, fisheries, the environment, and, indeed, most aspects of our daily lives are based. Natural scientists, including biological scientists, may have particular views on this or that economic policy, but few question the legitimacy of economics as a tool. We believe that, paraphrasing the great Prussian military historian Carl von Clausewitz, economics is too important to leave to the economists, and that natural scientists should not leave the procedures by which we undertake economics up to economists alone. Instead, natural scientists must contribute to a new discourse about the means, methods, and ends of economics.