Is economics a science?

Of course it is a science, but most critics of it should remember that it is a social science, and comes with all of the difficulty of proof that all social sciences suffer from. There are some common principles of the field that have strong theoretical and empirical foundations, and the rest of them are trying to make do with the constraints forced upon them by virtue of working with humans.<p>The principle of Supply and Demand is one that has so much historical empirical evidence that it might as well be called a physical law...but we can&#x27;t call it that because the principle relies on human cognition, culture, and other non-deterministic influences. Trade theory also has an extremely strong empirical evidence. A lot of microeconomics is also very emprical, and even has a lot of experimental control mechanisms for which macroeconomics does not. Still, we can accept these ideas as true beyond any reasonable doubt. However, we have an extremely long way to go before the rest of the field catches up to the same standards.

Questions like &quot;is X a science&quot; looks often like the &quot;True Scotsman&quot; fallacy<p>Or better, if you want to keep strict, to things that can have an experiment &quot;perfectly reproduced&quot; infinite times, then you have physics and chemistry for that.<p>Biology? No. A simple example, the LD for a substance. At LD50 you have 50% of samples dying. Here you have a substance with a very strong effect (death), at a high dose (because it kills 50%) and still, the chance of it effecting the sample is 50% (ok, 50% by design of experiment, and you&#x27;ll have an spectrum of reactions)?<p>An electron suffers a force inside an electrical field, 100% (exactly) of the time. Some things have some probabilities, like nuclear decay, where it decays to substance 1 A1% of the time and to substance 2 A2% of the time, but that&#x27;s it, no in-betweens.

I&#x27;m astonished that these questions get asked again and again, about fields that are obviously not sciences.<p>Fields that can and do test their theories against reality in practical, empirical tests, that discard falsified theories, and that have a corpus of supporting evidence that forces all similarly equipped observers to the same conclusion, are sciences. The rest are pseudosciences whose status is clearly shown by innumerable articles whose titles end in a question mark.<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/435/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;435&#x2F;</a>

You can&#x27;t apply the scientific method and when coming back in the real world leaving models and presumptions aside you see that economists never play an important role. They easily justify their failures no matter how big. You can&#x27;t even trust history books to tell you if the X policy was a success or failure.<p>In order to understand economics in my view, you have to know how politics work. Politicians and nations or people in power at any given time can turn a debt to 0 or to a war. Of course in a democracy it&#x27;s more complicated, but generally that&#x27;s the main idea. The their puppets try to justify the move.<p>It is what is happening in Greece, in the USA, in Italy and in other parts of world.<p>Rationality and math has little to do with economics. So since economists never predict anything really (when they do they get a Nobel), I hardly see this as a science.<p>As for the argument that physics or biology is not a science, I can know this: the same experiment can done time and again giving the same result. Try it in real-life economics...

I love to hear Schiller speak, even though I don&#x27;t subscribe to his particular behaviorist ideas (they are quite outside the mainstream of academic research). He is very measured in his criticism of the mainstream, and his article is a very fair summary (in my opinion) of how scientific mainstream economics is. Schiller is a moderate dissenter in that he thinks the current ration-agent-model approach is flawed, bout doesn&#x27;t advocate abandoning mathematical models.<p>Like Schiller, I believe that it is possible to test and validate theories, but at the same time we cannot have the same certainty as in physics, and the &quot;irreducibly human element&quot; will also prevent the same deep mathematical theories that we see in physics, ever being developed for economics.

No, it is not. Nor it should be.<p>Economist call their discipline &quot;social science&quot; basically because they suffer from &quot;science envy&quot;. They want to believe that there are simple things like &quot;water molecule is the bonding of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen&quot;. But in economy they are not, as economy is about the most flexible thing on Earth, humans and the relationship between them.<p>Economy is about dogma, there are Keynesians dogma followers(that look like never read a book of Keynes), Austrian dogma followers, and so on. Nothing to do with science but with power grabbing. Today all institutions are dominated by keynesians ands as everybody can see they are making the world a worse place.

It&#x27;s Science as much as any social science is Science.<p>The only reason we can&#x27;t transform social sciences into hard sciences is because it would be horrifically cruel and unethical to exert rigid, inflexible rules on thinking, breathing, feeling human beings.<p>You can&#x27;t turn human beings into raw predictable numbers without killing them, or throwing them in jail (however intangible such a prison might be, loss of choice and free will is enslavement).

It is a social science with assumptions on how things works. A lot of economic theories are just that assumptions, assumptions on how the market works.<p>If you have the time watch Professor Steve Keens one of the economists who predicted the 2008 subprime bubble criticize main stream economics.<p>Especially the Federal reserve system which is privately owned by the biggest banks. Read on Edward Griffins google the creature from Jekyll island. In that information you will find that the FED was created by a among others senator Aldrich who&#x27;s daughter was married to one of the banks who created the FED.<p>Thus private banks create debt out of thin air more now so than ever they are backed up by central banks. In the European central bank, the head of the bank comes from Goldman Sachs. There is a documentary called 97% owned which states 97% of all money in circulation are now debt just 3% is cash.<p>Ever wonder how the rich gets richer?

No. Social sciences aren&#x27;t sciences. They&#x27;re &quot;Social&quot; sciences. That doesn&#x27;t keep it from straying into the real sciences, just like computer science sometimes strays into real science.

You can hardly innovate in economics if politics don&#x27;t follow.<p>Economical decisions are so much entangled and tainted with politics, that&#x27;s a big reason why it&#x27;s not really scientific. The theory is sound, but practice is awful for many reasons, mostly political and because of the human factor.<p>Capitalism is a decent and somewhat balanced practice of economics, but the fact that it&#x27;s not a hard science shows that there is a disconnect between theory and practice.

I once thought that large-scale macro-economics was derived from empirical behavioral economics and microeconomics, similar to the way thermodynamics is derived from basic laws of physics (via the methods of statistical mechanics). That&#x27;s <i>not</i> what was done, but maybe someday...<p>Also, imagine a world where macroeconomic models get thrown out, or at least modified, when their predictions fail. Wouldn&#x27;t that be neat?

I consider economics to be more like a branch of philosophy than a science. The way to judge a good economic theory from bad one is to evaluate the soundness of its arguments. Historical data can never confirm or refute an economic theory because people have free will, and can act any way they choose.

It was much clearer when it was more appropriately called &quot;Political Economy&quot;.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_economy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Political_economy</a>

Surely the question should be, &quot;Can you apply the scientific method to economics?&quot;.

Why does it matter, why is that question such a hot potato?

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience#Psychology" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pseudoscience#Psychology</a> is psychology a real science?

Yet more intelligentsia bullshit from the Guardian. No. Economics is categorically not a science. It&#x27;s not even a social science. It is, at best, one of the humanities.