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For 90% of the cases that interest mainstream media, economics is not a science because proper experiments cannot be run. You cannot have clean counterfactuals
by mochomocha 7y ago
For 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?