Message from the Dean

I majored in mathematics at undergraduate level and geography at graduate level, but then, for some reason, I ended up working as a faculty member at College of Economics and Graduate School of Economics, where I teach demography, my specialty. Demography is sometimes broadly categorized as economics, but it is also a highly interdisciplinary field. While it is rare in Japan for people like me to move between several specialties, it seems to be more common in Europe and the United States. In fact, when I spent one year each in the United States and Canada doing overseas research, I got the impression that there are a lot of researchers who change their specialization.

As mentioned above, by changing my field of expertise, I have been able to see and hear a wide variety of ideas up close, which I feel has been a benefit to my research in no small way. What is particularly interesting is the difference in thinking between physics and economics. Both have solid academic systems and can be said to be core fields of natural science and social science, respectively. Below, I would like to use the food issue as an example to show the difference in thinking between physics, economics, and demography. I am sure I will be criticized for being presumptuous in placing demography in the same category as physics and economics, but I would like to see it as a representative interdisciplinary field.

How will these three fields think when food problems become serious? Physicists think about how to increase the conversion efficiency when solar energy passes through plants and is converted into food calories, economists think about how to appropriately allocate land, capital, and labor to the agricultural sector under the condition of rising food prices, assuming that the conversion efficiency is given, and demographers think about how excess population will be controlled by a falling birth rate and rising death rate, assuming that food production volume is given (this is the so-called Malthusian approach).

As you can see, the ideas in the three fields are very different. For those of you who are serious about studying economics, we hope you have glimpsed the importance of learning about ideas in fields other than economics. Our graduate school has professors with diverse research backgrounds and is blessed with opportunities to be exposed to a variety of ideas, so it can be said that we have an ideal research environment.