ABSTRACT
The great strength of economic geography is its ability to study place by synthesizing insights from social science and natural science fields. As a trained economist, I have always envied this conceptual breadth and was drawn, like many others, to economic geography because of it. Although some economic geographers have tried to construct abstract theories that are uniquely economic geographic, as in notions such as spatiality and spatial scale, I have always found this impulse puzzling. Narrow, if elegant, reasoning plagues the social sciences and limits the usefulness of many of its branches (above all, economics), just as the disciplinary divisions in the natural sciences thwarted ecological analysis for many decades. When confronted with annoying anomalies like imperfect competition or less than full employment, economics dismisses them into peripheral fields (industrial organization, macro-economics) to protect its maximizing mechanics of scarce resources and unlimited wants, its theory of the firm and celebration of markets. Geography, unencumbered by such orthodoxies, offers scholars and policymakers a remarkable arena for harnessing the best of the sciences in service of understanding and shepherding change.
