The soulful science

Being at home, I've got BBC Radio 4 on all day. It's talk radio for the chattering classes. So I get to hear all kinds of interesting things. Like yesterday, I heard a piece on the Soulful Science.

What do you think the soulful science is? Is it the study of saxophony? Is it the discipline of understanding the lurve connection between lustful adults? Is it economics? Yes, you guessed right. It's economics.

Economics is perhaps best known as the dismal science, but Diane Coyle wants to rebrand the study as The Soulful Science. She says that economists are misunderstood. Yesterday she enumerated those misunderstandings:

• economists are heartless/ don't care about people
• economists only care/ think everything is about money
• economists don't understand how people really behave
• economists don't understand the complex realities of real life
• economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing
  

...and so on. I've been told all these things to my face, mostly when I was a graduate student in economics. And that might have hurt me, had the screwed up little dark spot in my chest not already been dried to dust by the too much microeconomics.

Just kidding.

I kept saying "No, you don't understand..." or "Money's only a points system, it's not about the money." But that got me pretty much nowhere. And when one of the econ professors in our department said all economists share two traits - a fondness for high school geometry and a cynical view of human nature we couldn't find any student amongst our number who bucked his theory. And frankly, cynical geometry buffs don't sound very soulful.

Dr Coyle says that everything has changed about economics though...

Coyle shows how better data, increased computing power, and techniques such as game theory have transformed economic theory and practice in recent years, enabling economists to make huge strides in understanding real human behavior. Using insights from psychology, evolution, and complexity, economists are revolutionizing efforts to solve the world's most serious problems by giving policymakers a new and vastly more accurate picture of human society than ever before.

I'm not so sure that economics has changed. I always thought that the power of economics was its ability to predict human behaviour and inform policy and decision making. Economics, like any academic discipline, is pretty diverse. And while I didn't think much of Freakonomics, I did appreciate that it helped bring a more "human" face to economics. And I guess, it's easier to sell books on an argument of revolution rather than evolution.