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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

There's an idea in social science circles called physics envy. Economics especially is susceptible to this idea.

It's not supposed to be a good thing. You're not actually supposed to be envious of physics,

but social science is hard. People are messy. There's a lot of variables going on.

Physics is able to make enormous progress by simplifying things a great deal.

In part, that's because the fundamental ingredients that we study, even though it's like quantum

mechanics and cosmology and relativity and other things that sound way out, but there aren't

a lot of moving parts.

The basic things that we're looking at are sufficiently simple.

You can describe them using relatively few variables, and you can isolate all the interesting things that are going on in these systems with small numbers of variables.

As a result of this, you can make tremendous progress.

You can prove theorems, you can do experiments, the test, your theories to many, many decimal places.

It's a lot of fun.

Of course people would be envious of this.

But it's a disease or at least something to be avoided to therefore try to make your social scientific research too much like physics.

When you do social science, you should admit that there are complications

there that cannot be abstracted away in the same way that we abstract away air resistance

or friction when we're doing physics. Nevertheless, I'm sure that everyone who listens to

Minescape on a regular basis knows, I do think that there are contexts in which physics-like

reasoning can be helpful or even interesting in the social science. There can be contexts in which

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