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Economics, and social sciences, are still sciences. It's just not as clear cut as say, physics or mathematics. A lot of the interesting parts of economics are h
by Areading314 7y ago
Economics, and social sciences, are still sciences. It's just not as clear cut as say, physics or mathematics. A lot of the interesting parts of economics are how to build models that accurately predict human behavior.
In aggregate, it sometimes makes sense to model participants as rational, but this is a very simplistic model that does not always apply. There are lots of economists studying how asymmetric information or irrational participants can cause market failure or other outcomes.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoMathematics is not a science, and model building is not necessarily a science, either. Additionally, a significant number of social scientists aren't scientists.
- Areading314 7y agoI mean... a social science is a science by definition, and making an argument successfully within those fields involves proving it via the same methods that are used in natural sciences. It's just not as easy to eliminate variables and come to clean "laws" as easily, as is possible in say chemistry or physics. There is a lot of gray area, for example is medicine a science? Many treatments or diagnoses are based on probabilistic or empirical models -- that doesn't make them worthless.
- thedudeabides5 7y agoWhen the comments takes only three levels to get to "what is science?"
- havetocharge 7y agoNot sure why you're getting down voted. Economics is a science, full stop.
- kneel 7y agoEconomics is a science as much as Catholicism.
- nineteen999 7y ago"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists." - John Kenneth Galbraith
- jevgeni 7y agoOr mathematics.
- ivalm 7y agoI would argue mathematics isn't really a science, as it isn't outward looking to the world, rather it is a study of self-consistent rewriting rules. You can obtain any mathematical result without knowing anything about the universe (something also true for, lets say, analytic philosophy).
- disgruntledphd2 7y agoYeah. My personal theory is that mathematics is a language, which happens to be useful in the description of scientific phenomena.
- jevgeni 7y agoSure, but then the distinction between science / not-science hasn't got that much value. A not-science (math) is the most critical tool in the scientific toolbox, and hence contributed more to scientific progress than any isolated branch of science.
- ivalm 7y agoSure, natural languages also contributed "more to science" than "any isolated branch" but learning a language (for its use rather than linguistics/anthropology) isnt a science. I think it is a useful distinction.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago>There is a lot of gray area, for example is medicine a science? Many treatments or diagnoses are based on probabilistic or empirical models -- that doesn't make them worthless. Medicine is not generally considered a science. And never was it implied that things that aren't science are worthless.
- orwin 7y agoAre group and ring theory not a science, or are they not mathematics?
- mbesto 7y agoTo me, economics being a "science" implies the use of the scientific method. You cannot study economics in a vacuum...in other words you cannot conduct the "test" part of the scientific method, because the real world will always produce some other unknown imperfect variable that affects the theory. This is why behavioral economics are so important. IMHO it's the first truly concerted attempt at isolating economics to its core science in a repeatable and testable form (albeit not perfect). For example - understanding things like anchoring, recency bias, nudging, etc.
- richardw 7y agoSupply and demand is more core than anchoring and it was certainly discovered earlier. It's tested all the time. Add tariff, demand drops. That's also economics and works well in 2019. This stuff is now so obvious we've forgotten it and can now argue about whether economists can predict recessions.
- nradov 7y agoThe usual "supply and demand" rule doesn't even work consistently. See Veblen goods for a counterexample. So it's hard to see economics as a valid science. There are no consistent theories and exceptions to everything.
- klodolph 7y agoThis is a misunderstanding of what “science” is. Your objection is that the theories of economics are not correct enough for it to be a science. How is this argument not also true of, say, chemistry? Every simple theory in chemistry has a number of exceptions, with a more complicated theory waiting in the wings, up to the limit of our understanding. “Science” is not some kind of shorthand for “ultimate understanding of the world”. It is just a process for validating and understanding the limitations of theories.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoThe difference is that basic chemistry is fundamentally reliable. Basic economics is hand-waving and just-so stories and "Yes, but..." Absolutely no theory in economics passes even the most basic quantitative testing. Really. That is an observable fact. It's not an opinion. Empirical economics is barely even a thing, and even when it's a thing it's mostly nonsense, based on poor data and questionable methodologies. https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/J7atYOViQO54PiBzSTdAYL/Empirical-economics-growing-pains.html https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/J7atYOViQO54PiBzSTdAYL/Empi...
- mochomocha 7y agoFor 90% of the cases that interest mainstream media, economics is not a science because proper experiments cannot be run. You cannot have clean counterfactuals and no "A/B testing" setup to validate hypothesis in most interesting cases of dramatic economic events (like a recession). Most theories end up being... theories, with weak validation based on dubious instrumental variables, if any are considered at all.
- bacon_waffle 7y agoBeing unable to run those sorts of experiments doesn't disqualify a field from being a Science - consider astrophysics. I think the issue here is more that economics is describing human behaviour, and we don't fit well in to a mathematical formula.
- klodolph 7y agoThis is exactly correct. But the issue that “humans don’t fit well to a mathematical formula” is also true of everything that you don’t describe with quantum field theory. Even chemistry is full of this.
- philipps 7y agoA key aspect of the scientific method is that claims can be demonstrated to be not true (it doesn’t matter if the demonstration is done in a lab or not).
- notfromhere 7y agoYou do understand that economists run experiments all the time, right?