Shaking up the social sciences….

Yale University’s Nicholas Christakis advocates for change in the social sciences in the pages of the NYT here. Christakis is co-director of Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Money quote:

For the past century, people have looked to the physical and biological sciences to solve important problems. The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today’s intellectual challenges.

I would submit that Krasnow’s own department of Computational Social Sciences represents just such an evolution.