Hetan Shah argues that global problems need social science to help solve them (Nature 577, 295; 2020). I contend that he is both right and profoundly wrong.

Developing social inquiry as a social ‘science’ is a blunder that goes all the way back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (see go.nature.com/34exatc). To promote human welfare, academia needs to provide practical solutions to problems of suffering, poverty, injustice and avoidable death. It needs to articulate and assess possible solutions in terms of actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life and ways of living.

The task of social inquiry and the humanities is to guide people on how to resolve such issues and conflicts in effective, intelligent, humane ways. In connection with the climate crisis, for example, the public needs to know precisely what must be done by governments, businesses, the media, public institutions and individuals to mitigate global warming.

However, social scientists down the decades have fallen short in providing such guidance. In my view, this is because their focus has been on acquiring knowledge about society when it should instead be on promoting social progress towards as good a world as possible.