ABSTRACT
To begin with, the world is difficult to understand. Other sciences have their little problems too, but the public is less aware of them. Astrophysicists, for example, have been debating whether the universe will go on expanding indefinitely or will collapse into one big black hole in forty billion years. A 5 percent error in measuring the rate at which quasars are receding could spell the difference. This dispute has not captured the headlines. The point is, as J.B.S. Haldane put it, the universe is inexhaustibly queer, and that makes it hard to know what it is up to and why. Since the earth is one of the rather more queer places in an already queer universe, the problems astrophysicists face are nothing compared to those of economists. Just imagine, as Kenneth Boulding suggests, a world in which g is not constant; then you have some idea of what social scientists are up against.
