as a physicist this fascinates me because i would have watched this 20 years ago and disagreed, at least with his point (since i respect David Suzuki a lot).
see, physicists use equations to explain things all the time.
there is a practice, when analyzing a system, of utilizing the philosophy of “reductionism.” you don’t say that some things are important and others are not, but rather that some effects are much stronger than other effects, and then you ignore the weak effects and build a mathematical model. The classic example is ignoring air friction: air friction matters a lot, but in certain circumstances, it’s much weaker than other forces.
you actually see physicists moving out of their field of expertise and doing this kind of thing for fun. other fields find it irritating, but physicists gotta phys, you know?
(my favourite is the theoretical limit for the height of a giraffe. )
anyway.
i met and married a lady with ecology training.
and she would get SO MAD at me when she heard me do this.
because to the ecologist/biologist mindset, like my wife’s and like suzuki’s, in their field relationships matter. ignoring a certain weed in a particular field you are studying might leave out an important detail which explains how some caterpillar reproduces. In other words, if you killed off the weed, all the birds might starve to death and you’d never figure out why.
ecologists and biologists don’t practice reductionism, because it’s not clear what is and is not important over the course of things.
here’s the important bit, and the reason suzuki’s words have weight.
economics SHOULD be like ecology. For example (suppose it’s 1920), even if housewives aren’t in the workplace, they’re still super important to the economy, because they’re the ones keeping their families fed (which means that the workplace doesn’t need a cafeteria) and making sure that there will be more people to do the work in 40 years (sorry for the simplest example i could think of).
but economics ISN’T like ecology. it’s reductionist like physics. or at least the way it’s practiced.
and the reason is historical. The field started back in the 1800′s and early 1900′s, when physics was all “we’ve discovered thermodynamics,” “we’ve discovered the atom” and “albert einstein is the king of science.” Economists wanted the prestige, so they started mimicking the reductionist practices and mathematics of physicists. they even invented their OWN nobel prize, which is NOT the nobel prize, but mimics it so well that it could give a lesson to those moths that look like snakes.
and the whole thing would be entirely irrelevant, but politicians have started taking the advice of economists very very seriously, and justify the building or defunding of social structures based on their words.
so it matters that economics has foundational problems, because the things that economists leave out can be ruinous.
anyway, economics is actually a very interesting field, because after a century of development, it often has very interesting things to say about humans and their decisions, and their lives, and their mistakes. but you always have to take what they say with a grain of salt: as Suzuki is warning us to do.
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