Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

4 The Social Sciences

We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable …

(Kalanithi 2016, pp. 169–170)

4.1 Introduction

The most reductionist of the social sciences is orthodox economics, which has, for much of its life, sought scientific respectability by trying to emulate physics. The elementary unit of neoclassical economics is the “econ” (Thaler 2015), a travesty of a human being portrayed as a mathematical calculator, possessing perfect information and always seeking to optimize utility regardless of how others might think and behave. The actions of such “econs” are as determined and predictable as matter and can be incorporated into abstract mathematical models of the economy, as a mechanical system, in which a few variables can be identified and used to describe and predict behavior. The failure of orthodox economics to predict the financial crash of 2008 led Andrew Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, to admit: “It's a fair cop to say that the profession is to some degree in crisis.” Attempts are, in fact, being made in “behavioral economics” to pay greater attention to humans as they actually ...