When the President of the Royal Society did me the honour of inviting me to give this first Nuffield Lecture, he wrote that the Royal Society wished to ‘form some wider contacts with what can broadly be called the behavioural sciences’. I imagine that State Department officials in Washington sometimes speak similarly of the Communist government of China. It is too bad that the State Department has never been bold enough to grasp the forthright solution of inviting one of them to give a lecture. It may be thought that, as a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I am a particularly suitable person to lecture on economics to scientists. I am afraid that may not be so. I have sat through interminable committee meetings with my scientific colleagues, occasionally have taught economics to their children, and sometimes, having been told of an exciting and exotic new way to move people by rail from Boston to New York in one hour, I have said that it will almost certainly cost too much. But I cannot honestly say that I have ever up to this moment tried to function as a member of a one-and-a-half culture. Perhaps I should also warn you that the phrase ‘behavioural science’ may very well have been invented by other social scientists specifically to exclude economists, with respect to whom they feel a not uncommon mixture of inferiority and distaste.
