Description
This class will explore the efforts of the social sciences, most importantly economics and human demography, to move out of the shadow of the natural sciences. The history of the social sciences was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century characterized by an exchange of techniques and ideas between the areas of knowledge we now delimit as "natural science" and "social science." The passion for quantification and statistics, for example, originated in social scientific efforts, state bureaucracies, and public and private efforts to create reliable economic metrics. Yet, by the middle of the twentieth century, the two areas of knowledge making had become almost completely disassociated. However, the fossils of their long period of coevolution remain buried within the two areas, and there are signs that biology, psychology, and economics are once again actively and publicly borrowing from each other.