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It will be VERY VERY hard for economics (or any other social science) to have the kind of scientific integrity of Physics. The math is much looser, and many mo

It will be VERY VERY hard for economics (or any other social science) to have the kind of scientific integrity of Physics. The math is much looser, and many more assumptions need to be made.

obrero 11y ago
Also, pretty much all physicists want to know things such as, why there is more matter than anti-matter, if a good explanation for that can be found. If someone came up with a relatively solid answer to that question, the physics community would rally together. Everyone has the same goal - what is the truth? Whereas in economics, where the data is fuzzier, and you have questions like, how should the pie be divided up, people are not united together in the pursuit of a universal truth, things are more dialectic. Even the name economics is part of this agenda-pushing, as is the B.S. "Nobel Prize for Economics" and so forth - in the early days, "economics" was called by its proper name "studies of political economy". Nothing was more political than dropping the word political from the field.
ddingus 11y ago
Romer is not trying to raise the bar that high. We lack the means to experiment for it to make sense anyway. However, we do have the benefit of observation and can confirm predictions through ongoing data collection. There is enough there to qualify models and inferences made to justify a Feynman style of integrity.
noobermin 11y ago
Economics is "softer" than Physics and the math is looser, but the example the author gives about the support of a model's function is not a loose concept. The softness of the science may make predictability of a such a model suspect, but how the scientist omitted details about the behavior of a function is not due to the softness of the study, but due to the "adversarial equilibrium" the author comments on.
bachmeier 11y ago
He's not talking about the integrity of the field (whatever that might mean). He's talking about the honesty of the researchers, for example, giving a correct interpretation of the mathematics that they're using. If there are limits to your results, you need to be open about them.
- atmosx 11y ago
  There's no honesty really, in economics. Not even when they give nobel prizes[1]. Also in the documentary "Inside Job"[2] is clearly stated that "neoliberal school" (Chicago or New Chicago or whatever) is pushed through universities as the mainstream economic thinking. [1] http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/10/14/economics-nobel-2013-an-instinctive-reaction/ http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/10/14/economics-nobel-2013-an... [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
  - gknoy 11y ago
    As a non-economist, I find it hard to reconcile (or even know) the differences between X-school, Y-school, and Z-school economics teachings. Short of taking classes at a college (which I doubt I have time for), I don't know how to deal with conflicting things. We see this in talks about whether it's Good or Bad to raise wages, or tax people in various ways, or what to do with the national money supply. All the economic schools seem to have conflicting theories of what should be done, and I don't know how to compare them. It doesn't seem like they can all be right, can they?
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > All the economic schools seem to have conflicting theories of what should be done, and I don't know how to compare them. Note that some of the conflicts are not empirical; while economics is a field of science that deals with the relations between observable, measurable events in the real world (though, like many fields, there are can be serious challenges in unambiguously measuring the events of interest), the various schools of economics are not necessarily particular empirical camps with different reads of the evidence, they are in many respects different camps of moral and political philosophy with different views of goals of the economic system. As such, even in matters where the facts are not in dispute, their recommendations will differ. (This often becomes even more clouded because much of what is publicly presented by public pundits on economic matters is not honest intellectual debate but propaganda by one camp or another to convince adherents of the philosophical positions of the other camps that their different preferences would be best served by policies which are, in fact, preferred for other reasons than those being used to sell them.)
spacemanmatt 11y ago
Au contraire. The social sciences are statistical and rigorous, too. The objects measured are fuzzier, not the science practiced.
- wisty 11y ago
  If a physicist wants to prove that a perpetual motion machine can work, they'll be shot down. If a sociologist tries to do the equivalent, as long as their idea is attractive it's hard for detractors to prove they are wrong.
  - dalke 11y ago
    What's an equivalent? That a culture can be unchanged for 500K years? A sociologist who proposes that will be dismissed as being un-biological and a-historical.
    - wisty 11y ago
      Sociology is a big field, with a long history of bad ideas. For every sociologist, there's an equal and opposite sociologist. Let's just pick on one area, education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28philosophy_of_education%29#Criticism_of_discovery-based_teaching_techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28philosophy_o... > After a half century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, there appears no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners. Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective; there is also evidence that it may have negative results when student acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge So .. the big "theory" in education is that "students learn better by teaching themselves". That's probably not untrue, for a bored upper-middle-class student who's ahead of the class (who do you think does a PhD in education?), but for most students it turns out to be a bad idea. But it feels good to say "Teach the students how to learn, not what to learn!". And if you can write hundreds of thousands of words on the topic, and give a feel-good summary to peers, what's stopping the idea from gaining traction?

It will be VERY VERY hard for economics (or any other social science) to have the kind of scientific integrity of Physics. The math is much looser, and many more assumptions need to be made.

obrero 11y ago

Also, pretty much all physicists want to know things such as, why there is more matter than anti-matter, if a good explanation for that can be found. If someone came up with a relatively solid answer to that question, the physics community would rally together. Everyone has the same goal - what is the truth? Whereas in economics, where the data is fuzzier, and you have questions like, how should the pie be divided up, people are not united together in the pursuit of a universal truth, things are more dialectic. Even the name economics is part of this agenda-pushing, as is the B.S. "Nobel Prize for Economics" and so forth - in the early days, "economics" was called by its proper name "studies of political economy". Nothing was more political than dropping the word political from the field.

ddingus 11y ago

Romer is not trying to raise the bar that high. We lack the means to experiment for it to make sense anyway. However, we do have the benefit of observation and can confirm predictions through ongoing data collection. There is enough there to qualify models and inferences made to justify a Feynman style of integrity.

noobermin 11y ago

Economics is "softer" than Physics and the math is looser, but the example the author gives about the support of a model's function is not a loose concept. The softness of the science may make predictability of a such a model suspect, but how the scientist omitted details about the behavior of a function is not due to the softness of the study, but due to the "adversarial equilibrium" the author comments on.

bachmeier 11y ago

He's not talking about the integrity of the field (whatever that might mean). He's talking about the honesty of the researchers, for example, giving a correct interpretation of the mathematics that they're using. If there are limits to your results, you need to be open about them.

atmosx 11y ago
There's no honesty really, in economics. Not even when they give nobel prizes[1]. Also in the documentary "Inside Job"[2] is clearly stated that "neoliberal school" (Chicago or New Chicago or whatever) is pushed through universities as the mainstream economic thinking. [1] http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/10/14/economics-nobel-2013-an-instinctive-reaction/ http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/10/14/economics-nobel-2013-an... [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
- gknoy 11y ago
  As a non-economist, I find it hard to reconcile (or even know) the differences between X-school, Y-school, and Z-school economics teachings. Short of taking classes at a college (which I doubt I have time for), I don't know how to deal with conflicting things. We see this in talks about whether it's Good or Bad to raise wages, or tax people in various ways, or what to do with the national money supply. All the economic schools seem to have conflicting theories of what should be done, and I don't know how to compare them. It doesn't seem like they can all be right, can they?
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > All the economic schools seem to have conflicting theories of what should be done, and I don't know how to compare them. Note that some of the conflicts are not empirical; while economics is a field of science that deals with the relations between observable, measurable events in the real world (though, like many fields, there are can be serious challenges in unambiguously measuring the events of interest), the various schools of economics are not necessarily particular empirical camps with different reads of the evidence, they are in many respects different camps of moral and political philosophy with different views of goals of the economic system. As such, even in matters where the facts are not in dispute, their recommendations will differ. (This often becomes even more clouded because much of what is publicly presented by public pundits on economic matters is not honest intellectual debate but propaganda by one camp or another to convince adherents of the philosophical positions of the other camps that their different preferences would be best served by policies which are, in fact, preferred for other reasons than those being used to sell them.)

spacemanmatt 11y ago

Au contraire. The social sciences are statistical and rigorous, too. The objects measured are fuzzier, not the science practiced.

wisty 11y ago
If a physicist wants to prove that a perpetual motion machine can work, they'll be shot down. If a sociologist tries to do the equivalent, as long as their idea is attractive it's hard for detractors to prove they are wrong.
- dalke 11y ago
  What's an equivalent? That a culture can be unchanged for 500K years? A sociologist who proposes that will be dismissed as being un-biological and a-historical.
  - wisty 11y ago
    Sociology is a big field, with a long history of bad ideas. For every sociologist, there's an equal and opposite sociologist. Let's just pick on one area, education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28philosophy_of_education%29#Criticism_of_discovery-based_teaching_techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28philosophy_o... > After a half century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, there appears no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners. Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective; there is also evidence that it may have negative results when student acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge So .. the big "theory" in education is that "students learn better by teaching themselves". That's probably not untrue, for a bored upper-middle-class student who's ahead of the class (who do you think does a PhD in education?), but for most students it turns out to be a bad idea. But it feels good to say "Teach the students how to learn, not what to learn!". And if you can write hundreds of thousands of words on the topic, and give a feel-good summary to peers, what's stopping the idea from gaining traction?