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Cross-Disciplinary Scientific Foundation for Sustainability Chapter j 3 57

Rifkin and others need economics to provide the data and understanding
for the new European dream let alone those new dreams coming in Asia,
Africa, and the Americas. Many of the economic policies advocated in
Rifkin’s book are becoming a reality in the European Union as the Parliament
passed a three-tier program for implementing the “Third Industrial Revolu-
tion” (May 2007). Meanwhile, America cannot resist its reliance on statistics,
quantitative reports, and the “art” of economics. Economic data are historical
(or from the past) by their very nature and definition but open for interpretation
and understanding, and not all “data” are gathered as it is impossible. Future
economic trends or predictions are impossible and baseless. If any established,
new, or emerging nation is to advance, it must understand its past and present
and strategically interact for its future based on the application of scientific
know-how, ideas, and wants, thereby creating its future.
Indeed, economics has been toted as the science for explaining or even
predicting the future. However, its analyses are all based on the numbers from
the past. What this discussion has done is provide a scientific framework
rooted in philosophy, theory, and empirical data to create a science of eco-
nomics. Furthermore, applying qualitative economics to business and man-
agement through a Lifeworld perspective and the use of interactionism is a
scientific perspective that actually can handle the contradictions and paradoxes
that society meets today in the discussion of sustainability.
This discussion presents not only a “think-outside-the-box” perspective on
conventional and dominant functionalist economics paradigm, but also a
dynamic, interactive, and new perspective based on the philosophy of science.
Furthermore, Gibson and others in his volume (1997) argue that the world of
the future is uncertain and even chaotic. It is a dramatic departure from the
posteWorld War II world. New thinking in economics, and other fields, are
nonlinear and dynamic to account for a world in which the future is “terra
incognita” as Toffler puts it. The landscape of tomorrow is both unchartered
and accelerated. Economists can think of it as a speeding uncontrollable
automobile or as a challenge for making some sense from it.
Some economists have put forth a different approach to economics, such as
Levitt and Dubner in Freakonomics (2005) to signal that there is something
radically wrong with the conventional paradigm. What Levitt, a young and
increasingly well-established economist, has described as being of interest is
“the stuff and riddles of everyday life” (Levitt and Dubner, 2005, p. xi). As
Levitt says later in the book,
There is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of
Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the
real world.
Levitt and Dubner (2005, p. 205).
However, the authors fail to probe into the depth the interaction between
people in situations and events. They do not “ask the second” or follow-on