Social Sciences

Can human expression be mapped? If so, would it be meaningful? Has human knowledge been enriched because we now have a binomial distribution showing the heights of of people? Sometimes it seems the quantitative expression of human action , outside of the physical, but the socio-economic, political, and communicative-relational are fraught with impotence, or at least inefficiency.  

Think of the amount of study it takes to be able to design a bridge, or a building. The long years of math, a modest amount of physics and material science. It is about as long as one would have o spend studying to make complex computational models expressing the economic principles in a system, complete with logical operators, and statistically sound.

You spend a number of years finding a new gene sequence, or a vaccine. In the same number of years and you have defined old problems in new ways, maybe had a completely new model for some foundation principle, but really you have created so many more questions, and set your colleagues scurrynig to disprove and vet your work.

US President Franklin Roosevelt used the economic principle of Keynes to end the depression of the time, but what about the economic principles that were ignored in the Smoot-Hartley act of 1930? What of psychology and the way we raise our children, or conduct or workplaces? Political science has failed to prevent wars, not even wars for pride and glory.

(C) Michael Mosher 2010