How and why should scientists and economists collaborate in research on the issues of the day? Some preliminary and half-formed thoughts on the matter follow. These come partly in the context of me being asked to organise and host a session at the Ecological Society of Australia Conference, held at the University of Sydney, on how economists may productively collaborate with ecologists and other natural scientists on some of the major issues of the day (be they water, climate, biodiversity, etc.). More detail on what was presented in that session to be posted in another separate entry or two.
As an economist, it’s not hard to be aware of the puzzlement (and sometimes resentment) that scientists feel when what they regard as “their areas” of research get handed over to economists to frame policy discussions and responses for government. Stern (an economist) writes a major report on climate change for the UK government and Garnaut (an economist) is charged with framing a possible Australian policy response. In my area (research on sustainability) economists have been actively developing measures (notably, Genuine Saving) which are competitors with measures that tend to be preferred by scientists, such as the Ecological Footprint. And when the university decides to launch its Institute for Sustainable Solutions, it invites an economist (Sachs) to launch it.
And, as an economist, it’s not at all unnatural to me to see exactly what I’ve described above – economists at the forefront of dealing with what I see as fundamentally economic problems. One of the journalists (Glenn Milne, I think) on a recent Insiders program on the ABC said, almost as an aside, that climate change was an economic problem. And it is. If climate change was happening but had no significant consequences, then it wouldn’t be a problem, merely a scientific curiosity. The fact that it’s a problem means it has consequences that can be represented in terms of costs and benefits (as can policy actions designed to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change). Being “a problem” means that it’s an economic problem, more or less by definition.
Economists have thought about a variety of these kinds of problems for some decades now, in various forms. (What are now widely discussed as “cap-and-trade” schemes, such as for emissions trading, have been discussed by environmental and resource economists for over three decades now.) What’s been missing, or at least somewhat marginalised, for a long time, has been high quality collaborative multi-disciplinary work where scientists and economists came together to tackle key problems. Such work is not unknown, by any means, but it’s still difficult to get people working outside (or across) their disciplinary boundaries, and to put their own biases and disciplinary prejudices on hold.
And yet, now more than ever, it’s crucial that scientists and economists come together. Economists can only get so far looking at important environmental/ecological/natural issues without getting information on key parameters and interactions from the experts in the area – the scientists.
In one sense, what I’m saying is trite. Neither Stern nor Garnaut could do what they’re setting out to do without building on the scientific work of the IPCC and others. I talked about other examples in December with some colleagues, but the simple moral is, leading-edge work by economists on natural resource and environmental issues relies on scientific underpinnings. When the stakes are high (and when the government is commissioning something), good economic analysis drawing on science will emerge. The problem is, in my view, that there’s still far too little integrated, collaborative, multi-disciplinary research occurring between economists and natural scientists.
So how to make this happen? Economists need to be willing to better explain what it is they do, why they do it, and where the big unresolved issues still are. (One motivation for starting this blog, of course.) Scientists probably need to accept that while “good science” is a necessary condition for “good policy”, that is not the same as being a sufficient condition. Putting it as simply as I can, science will lay out our available options for us. Economics helps us make choices from those options. (There are other things economists can contribute, as well, but that is a big one.) As long as the world is a complicated place, both the scientific analysis and the economic analysis will be contestable, but that’s life as a researcher. My point here is to simply identify what I think is a reasonably appropriate scientific division of labour, as a prelude to what will be a bit of a campaign to enhance the scope for productive research collaboration between scientists and economists, because in natural resource and environmental policy, that’s increasingly where the action will be.
I’ll talk a little more about the session at the ESA in a separate post, but for now I’ll note that my Faculty colleague and fellow blogger Dr Willem Vervoort has commented on some discussions I was having with economist colleagues about how we might approach the session. Willem has been an “early adopter” of collaboration with economists within the Faculty, particularly in the form of a series of co-supervisory arrangements for graduate students. I’ve written too much already to address any of his comments in detail in this post, but I might come back and do that in a separate post. Suffice to say that I agree with a fair bit of what he says, but I’m going to reflect on it a little bit more first before I decide whether I want to clarify anything.