Hetan Shah rightly argues that social insight is needed to help meet the challenges of the next decade (Nature 577, 295; 2020). The important question is whether social science — and economics, in particular, as the queen of the social sciences — is up to the task of informing government policy.

After spending two decades drilling down on economic theory, I can testify that the field lags badly behind the development of hard science and engineering. Our universities must bring into the present the essential considerations of economics that were formed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century — when economic behaviour was explained in terms of the ‘marginal revolution’ (W. Jaffé Hist. Polit. Econ. 4, 379–405; 1972). To do so, they need to incorporate the important advances made since then in basic temporal and expectational economics.

Mathematical economics is not a sufficient condition for meeting the next decade’s challenges — but it is certainly a necessary one.