Why I Am a Scientist | Brian Easton

<> Café Scientifique; University of Waikato, May 5, 2009

<>Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

<>I was asked to talk about my time as a science student at school. I shall do a little of that, and also at university, but do so in order to provide a foundation for a discussion on how an economist can remain a scientist. So the second part of this paper is about how as an economist I have interacted with other sciences, and the final part is about in what ways economics is a science.

<>My Scientific Education

<>My father, lacking a tertiary education, was an electrician, which with hindsight I see as an applied scientist or engineer. My mother was more literary, a great reader of books, and later a school librarian at Hillmorten High School encouraging hundreds of students to read. Dad later became a psychopeadiac nurse at Templeton Hospital and Training School, which changed his scientific bent to the applications of medical science. But like Mum he was greatly committed to, and interested in, the people he worked with. I guess you can see patterns that their son inherited.

<>I had an ordinary schooling – this is the 1950s. Perhaps the highlight was in my Standard Four class, and the following year, we had a a couple of hours a week from a university mathematics lecturer, who was particularly interested in mathematical education: W. W. Sawyer was already well known for his Mathematicians Delight. and taught mathematics as interesting, fun and useful. It was a delight, and it engaged with the world. One of his biographers remarks that he had an inventiveness in finding physical illustrations of basic concepts. He taught me so well that I did not realised this was unusual.

<>A few years later I came across J. R. Newman’s four volume The World of Mathematics, which is a collection of papers about mathematics and its applications, Wonderful stuff for an early teenager with a mathematical bent. As well as meeting all sorts of new mathematics and giving them a historical context, it applied them to areas which may not immediately strike one as mathematical – like art. One paper was Archimedes’ ‘Sand Reckoner’ – in which he counts the number of grains of sand in the universe – with Newman’s forward explaining that Archimedes was figuring out how to give names to large numbers, a humbling exercise for a kid realising that one of the world’s greatest mathematicians had to work out how to count. I recall many of the papers but one that perhaps should be mentioned is an essay on Newton as the last magician, by a man who would have as great an impact on my thinking as Newton, although I did not know of him at the time: John Maynard Keynes.

<>My secondary school was solid rather than spectacular. We all did the same set of subjects in the third form year, and I did really badly at French. I seem to be a couple of neurological shunts short to be a good linguist. (My ear is not too good either.) I was probably not outstanding in general science either because biology seemed to be more about memory than theory. My memory varies from the good to the dreadful. I suspect one of the reasons I did not do as well at school as with hindsight you might have expected, is because in many of the subjects gave a premium to memory over analytic skills.

<>To give an example. In school certificate physics we were given an electrical circuit and asked which way the current ran. I did it from first principles, recalling the chemical reactions involved in the battery and deducing which way the electrons flowed. But blow me down, I forgot that the current ran in the opposite direction, a consequence of the convention being invented before they understood the chemistry and physics. Zero marks for my analysis. If I had gambled, or remembered only the rule from anode to cathode, I would have done better.

<>Poor language performance but reasonable achievement in English and Mathematics destined me for the N stream in the fourth form. The other professional streams we F for French and L fo Latin. N meant non-languages – science courses at that time were defined negatively.

<>My Christchurch Boys’ High was dominated by teachers who were near retirement rather than inspiring. On the whole I cant complain, although I envy those who recall English teachers who set their imagination alight – I doubt they went to all-boys’ schools. There are a couple of teachers I would mention. My fourth and fifth form physics teacher – alas he went to another school in my sixth form year – was Trevor McKeown, who gave the class a thorough grounding in the foundations of mechanics. More than fifty years on, I can repeat the first thing he taught us: ‘the absolute unit of force is that force which gives unit mass, unit acceleration’. See, my memory is not bad providing the information which belongs to a matrix of related ideas.

<>In the lower and upper sixth I had Alan Wooff for chemistry. I have recently learned he belonged to a group of Canterbury chemists committed to raising the quality of and interest in chemistry teaching. He certainly did that for me. It may be that it was only because I was clumsy in the laboratories – indeed I was a positive danger – that I did not become a chemist. One of his strengths was that he taught the foundations. I can still recall Avogadro’s number – 6.023 times 10 raised to the 23 – the number of molecules in a mole. (It is instructive I could remember the number, but had to look up the spelling.) Incidentally, I remembered that the 6.023 was actually 6.022, a small error to help us remember. A thorough understanding of the notion meant the rules of chemical interaction had a meaning. Six years after I learned them, and four years after I had given up Chemistry, I used this knowledge to assist a student through Biochemistry II.

<>I also did physics and applied mathematics in the sixth form. In my last year I attended a couple of Royal Society lectures which aimed to give students a wider perspective of the possibilities of science. One by Professor Jack Vaughan on phlogiston was terrific – history of science again. But it was the other lecture which almost seduced me. Dont remember much, except Professor Robin Allen said at its beginning that a lecture was not the best way to appreciate geology, and there would be a bus outside the university on Saturday morning so we could go for a field trip. Terrific, never-to-be forgotten, day, although I was glad I never took geology because I still cant remember the names and dates for various geological eras.

<>Another set of lectures was run by the mathematics club set up by Walter Sawyer. I particularly recall Robin Williams, then head of the Applied Maths Division of the DSIR (subsequently vice-chancellor of two universities and chairman of the State Services Commission), on the statistics of field trials, especially when you lost one of the observations in the experimental plots. Another was by Professor Derek Lawden who described integration by analogue computers. I asked whether they could integrate the inverse of x (1/x), and was told dismissively ‘of course’. What Lawden did not realise was that I was worried about what I would later learn was called a ‘pole’ when x equalled zero, which was probably pretty sophisticated for a sixteen year old. An analogue integrator works fine providing it does not integrate across a pole.

<>Add my wide scientific reading – including a chemistry section which Alan Wooff had set up in the school library; I was reading about RNA and DNA before the double helix reached New Zealand – and I lived in a pretty stimulating scientific environment despite the school syllabus being largely a solid scientific foundation of dullsville.

<>Since my scientific strength was mathematics, I did it at university. The Canterbury department was led by Lawden who was a first-class applied mathematician and an exciting lecturer, although between him and Walter Sawyer I never really got a taste for the rigours of pure mathematics. To me mathematics was a means of engaging with the world. Actually the universe, because I almost became a cosmologist. Probably a good thing I didnt, because Lawden also taught quantum mechanics and my ambition was to reconcile them. Better men than I have failed.

<>It was usual for good mathematics students to take an extra subject as well as a foreign language knowledge. I totally respect that scientists need to work outside their own language culture, but in truth for most of us English was a foreign language. I was not going to do French – I had already failed that. I struggled through German but the timetable clash meant I could not do statistics and numerical analysis (I did them in the following year). So I did economics I instead.

<>The story of how I got into economics belongs elsewhere. (In Part.) But a couple of points are pertinent here. First, as well as reading science I had been reading widely including a lot of social commentary, so the progression to the social sciences was not surprising..

<>Second, in the same week I was taught the mathematics of lagrange multipliers, my economics lecturer covered an economic issue which can be elegantly set out using that mathematics. I have not the time here to explain lagrange multipliers but they are shadow prices and integral to a deep understanding of price theory. This had only really been found out a decade or so earlier, so I was close to the mathematical economic frontier, even doing first year economics.

<>While I became a social scientist, I never left the natural sciences and mathematics. I still read about them for recreation. I confess that I am thoroughly confused over particle physics, but dont feel alone. I have also moved into areas I have did not study at school, such as ecology and evolution. (I greatly admire Stephen Jay Gould’s writings.)

<>An Economist Working With Scientists

<>As an economist, I have had to interact with science and scientists. If they are quarrelling in an area – say peak oil, global warming or A2 milk– you either have to take one of the sides at face value with the danger that you may simply adopt the ideologically convenient one, or spend a bit of time trying to master the subject. Often any conclusion is on the soft side but firm enough make some economic progress.

<>For instance I was aware of the theory of global warming, before it was scientifically firm. I concluded then we could not be sure that it was significant possibility but the prudent action was to slow down the processes which might be contributing it. Of course one needs vehement advocates, and in this case they seem to have been proven right, but decisive moderation also has its role, especially when they use the precautionary principle. They tell me it takes thirty miles to stop an oil tanker, so you should slow down if there is any evidence of threats on the horizon.

<>As a professional statistician I am well aware of the difficulties of forecasting. I usually mention when I teach in my first econometrics class that prediction is unwise – especially about the future. The confidence intervals blow out as you look further ahead; I do wish forecasters would give those ranges more often. That has been one of the problems with the peak oil debate. It is inevitable that one day oil production will peak and then fall, but there is considerable uncertainty when. Whatever the uncertainty, the consequential interactions are even more complicated. There are substitutes for oil, typically more costly, but those costs are coming down. One cannot be certain, but it turns out that as far as I can see some prudential responses are clear enough. We should accelerate the adoption of oil substitutes and since it takes about thirty years to reconfigure locations to make best use of public transport arterial routes, we should be putting the routes in now, even if not expecting to get an immediate commercial return. Similarly for electrification of rail and for insulation and energy efficiency in the housing stock.

<>While I am talking about the uncertainty of forecasts, a word about Club of Rome projections which are still sometimes raised with me, despite their forecasts having been demonstrably wrong. Some colleagues backcasted their runs – time is not an arrow in a model – and found they gave a massive world population boom to about five billion and bust around 1800. So dont forget history. For an economist it is a source of data for testing current theories – I have found working on the Long Depression of the 1880s and 1890s (seventeen years in all) immensely helpful for understanding the current Global Financial Crisis.

<>But there is something else here, even more important and subtle. The Club of Rome model is a non-linear dynamical system, which unlike a linear dynamic system is not stable. Famously Laplace told Napoleon that he had no need of God. What he was probably referring to was that he had solved the problem which Newton’s linear system had left open: whether planetary orbits were stable; if not, every so often God might have to tap the planets back on track.

<>Newton’s insight was amazing. In principle a handful of equations can predict the paths of heavenly bodies for centuries to come. Of course it is more complicated than that, but we now know that the stability properties which make such accurate forecasting possible do not apply to non-linear dynamic systems. Trivial differences in initial conditions or minor contingent events may alter immensely the long run behaviour of the phenomenon we are tracking. Chaos theory is one name for this. You will know the story of how a butterfly in Japan can cause a hurricane in New York – or even a financial storm, I suppose.

<>It may be that the properties of a non-linear dynamic system is one of those mind-changes so enormous we have yet to come to terms with it. For three centuries, Newton has been model for the sciences. Even economics has been seduced by its elegance. In his Wealth of Nations Adam Smith refers to Newton more than to any other intellectual. Economists have since been driven by the notion that a few simple ideas – such as economic rationality – would not just underpin our understanding of the economy, but enable us to analyses and predict it. What chaos theory tells us is that any predictions are likely to be largely wrong in the long run, because contingent events will affect the track. Perhaps like Laplace we no longer need the hypothesis of God in science, but as scientists we continue to need a humility before Her.

<>History becomes important. I am currently writing a history of New Zealand from an economic perspective. The need arises from an ongoing failure by historians to recognise that economic history has a been important, even at an elementary level. For instance the great prime ministers identified by historians are typically those associated with economic booms while, conversely, some very effective politicians are forgotten because they struggled with economic depressions – Harry Atkinson in the 1880s and Gordon Coates in the 1920s and 1930s.

<>When I first applied for a grant to do the history it was to a scientific fund. Thinking about their needs I said I would pay attention to science and the environment in my history. Sadly the grant has not been forthcoming. When I applied for funding from some humanities organisations I dropped the references to science – mainly because the structure of the book structure was becoming unwieldy.

<>The humanities funding was more responsive (but as it happens its pockets are not as deep and the study is only half finished). Blow me down though, when I began writing the book, I could not keep the science out. The first chapter of the book, entitled ‘The Economy Before Humans’, is primarily a scientists’ chapter about the geology and ecology before the ancestors of the Maori arrived. It begins 650 million years with the cratons of Gondwanaland long before there was any land mass we might call ‘New Zealand’ (or the Zealandia continent). This is not some conceit. The land mass and its ecology are integral to many features of the modern economy.

<>You will have to read the book – if I can get the funds to finish it – but let me give one example. The wool economy was critical to nineteenth-century New Zealand. But 93 percent of the sheep were south of Taupo in 1891, while two thirds of Maori were north of the lake.Thus Maori were largely cut out of the wool economy, which adds to the story of their economic failure at the end of the nineteenth century, in addition to having been undermined by the loss of their land. By the time the dairy industry phased in (north of Taupo and elsewhere) the Maori seem to have been too impoverished to take advantage of the capital intensive industry, even where they kept their land. Why were sheep so scarce in the top of the North Island? The simple answer seems to have been footrot and bush sickness – in the realm of science. Why were Maori common there? That is explained by nutritional science.

<>Let me complete these illustrations of how my life as an economist has interacted with the natural sciences with three further examples. Economics has something to say about resource management. Take water. Economists have been coming to the view that water may be more important to the future of the world than oil; it has fewer substitutes, it is relatively more expensive to transport, and it is much more poorly managed (an economist might say because its markets are more screwed up). It would appear New Zealand has a comparative advantage in water. Are we going to ignore the potential benefit by continuing poor management?

<>The second involves psychology. Over time economists began to adopt with increasing rigour the notion of rational economic man, whose decisions were based on optimising some well specified objective function. There were two practical reasons for doing so. First there was not an obvious alternative; second the mathematics is very simple, since just about all the second order terms disappear. Perhaps there was a third ideological reason which said that nobody – especially the state – should override an individual’s decision.

<>In recent years a number of (mainly American) economists have been paying close attention to the psychological literature, and as a result have created a new area called ‘behavioural economics’ – the mathematics of which is almost as elegant as that for rational economic man. It was an underlying justification for Kiwisaver, and is important in the work on addiction of such drugs as alcohol and tobacco, although thus far its applications are limited, as you might expect of a new field. As it evolves I shant be at all surprised if it makes a major contribution to explaining the irrational behaviour in the financial sector which led to the Global Financial Crisis.

<>My last example is a celebration, for my role had little to do with the science, just the giving of some economic advice. Apparently those with diabetes 2 produce more of the cuprous than cupric forms of copper, which weakens their (especially heart) muscles and shortens their life. (I describe the ions by these terms rather than copper 1 and copper 2 – to honour my Chemistry teachers.) The proposed drug, Lazarin, reduces the excess of the wrong ion, moderating the diabetics’ deterioration. When I had this explained to me I said ‘it’s a chelate’. (Astonishment from the scientist, Garth Cooper; thankyou Alan Wooff who introduced me to the notion forty years earlier.) It’s a ‘Rutherford’ experiment, an apparently simple idea with lots of complex science underpinning the simplicity. Because diabetes 2 is a growing epidemic among the affluent, the finding may have enormous consequences. It could even lead to the first Nobel prize for research on New Zealand soil. My role was small in the development, but I am proud have been involved.

<>You may have noticed that I have made numerous references to mathematical modelling. Lawden (and earlier Sawyer) trained me well in that discipline; later I was to have the good luck that an economics teacher, John Zanetti, facilitated the transfer of the modelling skills to economics.

<>I belong to the Marshall School of modellers. Alfred Marshall was a great economist – his textbook first written in 1881 was still recommended to students in the 1960s, forty years after he died. A mentor of Keynes and perhaps even a better mathematician (he was a junior wrangler at Cambridge), he wrote that he had

<>“a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules

<> (1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than an engine of inquiry.

<> (2) Keep to them till you have done.

<> (3) Translate into English.

<> (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.

<> (5) Burn the mathematics.

<> (6) If you can’t succeed in (4), burn (3).

<> This last I did often.”

<>Earlier in his textbook he had relegated his mathematics to footnotes – it is regrettable that his successor economists have not been as scrupulous. A son of the manse, and deeply involved in the questions of the day, Marshall put on the title page of his Principles the Aristotelean ‘natura non facit saltum’ – nature does not make sudden jumps. In my youth I thought this was a defence of his use of calculus. But Darwin had earlier used the phrase. Marshall the mathematical economist was also interested in biological development.

<>I model a lot. I can walk into a situation and start setting out equations in my head about an aspect which intrigues me. It is likely to be a process model than an optimising one – the heritage from Lawden, whereas many economists focus on optimising behaviour. Like Marshall I try to suppress the modelling when I am explaining something to the general public. I am so intuitively a mathematical modeller I thought all economists were, but the stark realisation of recent years is that the majority of the profession are not as naturally proficient.

<>Is Economics a Science?

<>Interacting with science and scientists does not make one a scientist. Many would be surprised that an economist can be one. I begin my explanation by noting that in the 1960s the University of Canterbury was still greatly influenced by the thinking of Karl Popper, who continues to influence my approach to science generally and economics in particular – he’s another author on my reading list. To be a Popperian means one believes there is a realm which is real and whose domain is subject to Popper’s methodology of scepticism and a continual testing of the hypotheses of theoretical models against evidence, modifying them where necessary. An important implication is that there is a realm of our total experience, which is subject to scientific methodology, but there is also a world which is not. That second world is no less important than the world which scientists investigate, but we should not get them confused.

<>Of course economics is like astronomy, ecology and biology in that experimental testing is limited, but they are no less sciences either, because they are based on propositions which can be in principle be tested by scientific standards. Max Planck, one of the fathers of modern physics, said that he eschewed economics because it was too difficult. He’s right. Physics is sometimes called the Queen of Sciences, but it has progressed so successfully because it is easy, compared to some of the others. This is not to diminish physics; I greatly admire its achievements, But a more typical science – the middle class in the middle of the spectrum – would be ecology.

<>As I have indicated economics is like ecology – their names even come from the same Greek word for ‘household’. Unfortunately in both cases – and indeed in some other difficult sciences such of psychology – we expect more from the scientists than they can deliver; in the case of economists much more than we can ever deliver.

<>To cover the ignorance, we have much pseudo-science in public discussion, based on‘theology’ or ideology. All subjects contain some – an existential belief in some truisms which cannot (or may not) be readily tested. Physics requires various assumptions about the real world which are unprovable; Hume asks how we know the sun will rise each morning. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems haunt mathematicians in one way or another. However a scientist aims to limit such beliefs to that which is absolutely necessary. Everything else is open for debate and has to be rigorously tested.

<>Many people are less rigorous, and hold beliefs that are in principle testable but they wont contemplate the possibility. They muddle the Popper’s distinction between the first world and the second, transferring propositions about the first world into the second.

<>Melvin Reder calls their methodology the ‘tight prior’, a reference to the Bayesian who commences with assumed parameters which are so well specified that new evidence does not change them. Instead, Reder argues, the skill is to interpret any evidence so it is consistent with the nigh-on-inviolable theory. A strategy – frequently practised in New Zealand – is to ignore contradictory evidence, which is one of the reasons why the dominating conventional wisdom tends to ignore our history, or uses it very selectively.

<>One of the most pernicious problems is how most people get their understanding of economics from ideologists and journalists who know only what ideologists tell them. It is very much the blind leading the blind, and all fall into a pit of ignorance of economics. It is especially irritating for an economist when we are told of what economics or economics believe drawn from this source.

<>I do not want to make here making the distinction between what we call positive economics – how the world is and how it functions – and normative economics – how the world should be and how we should change it. This paper is focussing solely on positive economics, although we should note that some ideologists seem to require the positive world to conform to their normative vision of what should be done. I illustrated this earlier, when I suggested one of the attractions of the model of rational economic man which is an account of the actual world, was that it reinforced those who were ideologically anti-statist which is a normative vision.

<>The distinction with which I am concerned can be better explained in terms of Kuhn’s paradigm, the way that a profession organises its investigations. One of the features of such paradigms is that some theories are taken for granted. It is not that they are unchallengeable. Of course no scientist challenges every part of a paradigm, but in principle he or she may. Kuhn sees scientists as revolutionaries; the conventional wisdom of the counter revolutionaries wants to prevent the revolution – to stop genuine scientist.

<>The result of this approach is that there are hypotheses whose truth a scientist may want to test but the conventional wisdom does not, that it is threatened by any challenge, and that it punishes those who in the ordinary course of their scientific endeavour challenge them. That which may not be challenged, frequently reflects self-interest (or the interests of the employer) or some ideology.

<>There is so much that is in this category, that a scientist leaves many of the ‘truths’ for another day, when the evidence against them becomes compelling. We are in such a era today; the Global Financial Crisis is undermining many of the conventional wisdom’s accepted truths, although it is interesting how many are grimly held onto by the non-scientific ideologists. Planck’s law reminds us

<>“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

<>I could easily illustrate these issues with many economic conflicts, but tonight I choose science policy, partly because this audience will be more familiar with the area, but also because it has both a paradoxical conclusion and a sobering one.

<>Many people pontificate on economics without understanding it. For instance, many attacks on economics amount to the idea that economics analysis contradicts the laws of thermodynamics. But as Paul Samuelson has pointed out, economics is grounded in those laws – without them there would be no production functions and no trade-offs, fundamental notions of economics..

<>Similarly I am often told, by those who have not studied economics, that economics depends upon unlimited economic growth. That cannot be true since many great economists – Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter, for instance – were stagnationists, that is, they expected economic growth to end; Keynes wrote of the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. What he meant, and others thought too, was that as capital was accumulated, the return on capital would fall, until there would be no incentive to invest, so economic growth would stop. (This is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics.)

<>The difficulty with this approach was that per capita incomes in the rich world quadrupled in the 180 years between Ricardo and Schumpeter. You can set up auxiliary hypotheses to explain it, but in the 1950s, as the data became available, it became evident that a theory of economic growth dominated by pure capital accumulation was inconsistent with the facts.

<>There is a famous 1956 paper by Bob Solow, much quoted by the scientific community, which demonstrated there had to be some other contributor. He called it ‘technical change‘, saying

<>“I am using the phrase ‘technical change’ as a shorthand expression for any kind of shift in the production function. Thus slowdowns, speedups, improvements in the education of the labour force, and all sorts of things will appear as ‘technical change’.” (Solow’s italics)

<>Solow’s paper is the source of the widely quoted claim that 80 percent of economic growth (output per person) is attributed to technology. True, but only if the word ‘technology’ has Solow’s specialist meaning of that it is what we cannot explain, of what a couple of economists, Tommy Balogh and Paul Streeten, called the ‘coefficient of ignorance’. A physicist might call it ‘dark matter’ – there is something out there which is affecting our understanding of how the world works but we dont know what it is. (While reading a Sceintific American on the way to this presentation, I was reminded that dark matter is also about four to five times more important that the matter we can observe.)

<>It was perfect situation for any group with a self interest to promote to claim the coefficient of ignorance for their own. They all did – educationalists, managers, capitalists, and of course scientists, who claimed that it was science which drove economic growth. (Many of those who argue for increasing the coefficient of ignorance strike one as having sufficient ignorance to make a real contribution.)

<>Unfortunately half a century later we remain uncertain what this dark matter is. In the case of economics no one is willing to spend five billion dollars – the amount we are spending on the Large Hadron Collider – investigating the economic problem. The cynic might argue that rather than promote scientific research in economics we let the ideologists run wild, and they have destroyed over four trillion dollars of value, almost a thousand times more than the cost of an LHC.

<>Scientists seized on the hypothesis that technology, as they understood it rather than as Solow defined it, was the driver of economic growth, not only because it made them important but it seemed to justify spending large quantities on public money on research science and technology.

<>So Solow’s hypothesis about how the economy functioned became an ideology. I recall in the 1980s being at a Royal Society meeting on science policy and being shouted down when I raised some of the problems with this view. Paradoxically, in a room of professional scientists I was the only one behaving scientifically.

<>If you are to sup with the devil, they say to use a long spoon. If it is a short spoon at least understand who is on the other side of the table. Unfortunately the science community was too committed to its ideology, too hungry for the public cash, to do so. Instead – to mix the metaphor – they got into bed with the commercialisers, who had quite a different agenda,.

<>The effect of the devilish alliance was to direct science in a particular direction, one which many scientists told me they disagreed with. We have spent the last decade trying to unscramble the decisions of the early 1990s – in science but also in other areas, including health and tertiary education which were also transformed by commercialisation.

<>The story is not over. Another review of science funding and organisation is underway, and again the science community will be vulnerable to change in policies which are not in their interest. With their ideology, they will find it difficult to engage with those who want change to make (as they put it) the spending on science more effective (actually to reduce it). I am repeatedly struck by the inflexibility of the scientific community in relation to economic issues, because of the ideological underpinning of their approach to science policy, which ultimately can be summarised as Oliver Twist’s ‘more’. What happens when the pot is limited? There is already evidence of tensions within the science community.

<>Those of us who are genuine scientists have little to contribute to this row because it is an ideological not a scientific one. Ironically the scientist have little standing in the scientific community when it comes to science policy and, in any case, Planck’s law warns that it takes a long time to for an ideology to die – silver crosses and garlic aside.

<>Of course science policy is not the only area where the unwise adoption of ideological positions has led to difficulties. In a gathering of economists I could give many other illustrations. You might conclude from such examples that the economics profession is dominated by ideology and that scientists have but a marginal role. The economic scientist may think you are right, but nevertheless defend the notion that economic scientists exist, and that parts of economics can be a science.

<>Crucially, what I have tried to explain tonight is that there is a scientific component to economics – sceptical and empirical – and there are economic scientists who labour in that vineyard under great difficulties. If we ignore them; if we deny them – whether the ‘we’ is scientists, financiers or the general public – we do so at our peril.

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