How the Biophysical Paradigm Impedes the Scientific Advancement of Ecological Economics: A Transdisciplinary Analysis

Ecological economics (EE), which typically conceptualizes the economy as a biophysical entity that grows into a finite ecosystem, was poised to become “economics as a life science”, or the science of sustainability, and thus an alternative to mainstream economics. However, while there is consensus among researchers that it has failed to become so, there is consensus neither on the underlying causes of this failing, nor on what exactly the heterodox alternative is. For instance, biophysical economists tend to see the biophysical paradigm (BP) as the key to scientific advancement, while institutional economists tend to see it as an impediment. The current research addresses this lack of consensus. To set the foundations for an in-depth and necessarily transdisciplinary analysis, this article first reiterates and elaborates on a fact that typically eludes modern EE: EE’s scientific roots lie not in the BP, but in the analogy of the economy-as-an-organism. This article then formalizes the relationship between this analogy and the BP, to analyze it systematically using cognitive science’s structure-mapping theory, which explains the role of human analogical processing in learning and the advancement of science. The findings suggest that: (1) As a scientific model, the BP is merely a partially articulated form of the economy-as-an-organism analogy, and thus suffers from a type of model specification bias. (2) This bias appears to manifest in EE as a “black box” economy, relationally operationally analogous to a life science studying an organism as if it had no organs. (3) These findings are consistent with those of a recent publication that debates the role of the BP, despite employing very different assumptions and perspectives—thus corroborating the current article’s methods and findings. These findings have an overarching implication: EE may advance scientifically by identifying the economy analogs of fundamental omitted organs, thus facilitating the transfer of causal knowledge from biology to economics to further “economics as a life science” or “the science of sustainability”.