This is a reply to someone in discussion forum who insisted that mathematics is very important if not central to economics and social science in general. I don't agree especially on the latter. Their academic mindsets are just too closed to be realistic. They forget the nature and purpose of economics as a social science, and just do maths for maths.
Link: http://www11.discuss.com.hk/viewthread.php?tid=7587344&extra=page%3D1&page=4
Env econ has a purpose of informing policy. Researchers commonly make use of many maths modelling and technical appraoches, like a 'must' in every publication. However, some people, including trained economists, considered this as source of problems rather than an advantage now (it's 'common' but flawed). They criticized the highly focused appraoch with maths has 'reduces the env problems to narrow technical issues and deliberately excludes a range of potential options and an interdisciplinary approch'.
For example, maths-based econ can hardly measure cultural-ethical value as it is non-marketed, slippery & not quite consistent to utilitartian theory. When assessing the value of fengshui forest 風水林, resource economists tend to look at productivity only, like the market value of timber and land which are measurable and more reliable (so, 'economically justifiable') and can be well fitted into maths-based techniques like CBA (cost-benefit analysis). However, this simply bypass those values (sort of cultural, 'religious' dimensions, like so called 龍脈, 風水山墳) that the local villages do care. Applying this econ etimate to project evaluation without taking such considerations may simply create conflict and may therefore be rejected by locals, green groups, and sometimes the government themselves. The equation looks good, but the number or symbol is narrowly defined given the nature of the issue.
Likewise, someone in World bank said it is economically justified to transfer all electronic waste to Africa. I suppose he can a make maths equation to show that this is efficient from econ perspective. However, you can imagine the justice and politics issue here. It is difficult to incorporate those value dimensions and issues that cannot be easily be precisely transferred as numbers in maths model, as I hv mentioned in my first post. If we strictly follow maths rules and stick to maths model as a policy basis, the result will be excluding some real-world issues that are really important to policy makers. This is the problem with hedonic pricing method, contingent valuation method (for valuing non-marketed goods) commonly used in env econ. The same problem applies to the Arctic energy resource, justice, politics,...and the list goes on. It is difficult to put these into equations - will u ask someone how much is your ethical belief?. Excluding these dimensions is a tradition of econ, but is a problem as well when the social aspirations change thru these years. That's why a renowned env economist said that env econ did not pay a key policy role - the maths-based, technical approaches are just too unrealistic to apply in real policy implementation. This view is supported by quite a number of economists in the field.
The flaw of the math-based env econ is then clear. By sticking to the orthrodox model they ignore those outside their discipline. They use maths, they make policy advice, but they ignore the linkage with other perspectives which are imcompatible to their mindsets. But env issues are complex and trans-disciplinary, exclusion of non-economic perspectives is just a ignorance of realities. Finally, policy may be misguided. And this partly contributes to the development of ecological economics, which takes philosophy, politics, economics, sociology...etc into account. If the mainstream economics is perfect, we don't need this.
In fact, in social science, there is a trend (actually a tradition) to move across disciplinary boundary. Sociology involves politics, econ is related to psycho, journalism to sociology and politics; geography almost covers all. And finally, all these are built upon philosophy. So, social scientists have no excuse to escape from other disciplines' inputs.
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