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Well go read the book and argue against that, that's good enough for me. Economics is not a science, economics uses science. The alternative to economics is pol

Well go read the book and argue against that, that's good enough for me. Economics is not a science, economics uses science. The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. Where you are have to argue for policies politically rather than just pushing them because leading economist nobel prize winner said so.

taffer 7y ago
> Economics is not a science, economics uses science. So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. > The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. Also, economics is not a normative science like philosophy. Everything economics does is to say: "According to model M, if you do X in situation Y, then Z happens". If politicians turn it into austerity measures or deficit spending, then that' s politics, not economics. > because leading economist nobel prize winner said so. Be more specific. Who said what?
- devoply 7y ago
  > So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. 1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences. Please list a set of economic truths. Any set will be good enough as long as it can make reliable predictions that can be tested in the real world. > You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. You could, but the point is not to. Or if you want to then make sure that the science is predictive. > Be more specific. Who said what? When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive but at the same time can be shown to be unpredictive which proves that it is not fit for this task. Yet economists and their political allies continue to argue that it is. Maybe it's better than simply political arguments and maybe the justification for supporting the orthodoxy is in line with that. That you're scared of the political outcome and so economics is a safer option.
  - taffer 7y ago
    > Please list a set of economic truths. Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either? > When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive... That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.
  - gbacon 7y ago
    The physicist can drop a stone with a certain mass from a tower of a particular height and can predict that the next time she drops that rock from that tower, it will take the same amount of time to hit the ground. Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective. Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions. Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem Science is more than just high school physics problems.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Economist here! Economics is definitely not a science. It is a social science -- it can use the methodological tools of science to investigate and support theories applied in situations where the whole may behave predictably but individuals typically won't. We certainly test hypotheses, strategize, and theorize. But, contrary to physics or biology, there probably will never be a set of iron-clad rules and facts that can be derived. When I went through graduate school, the elephant in the room was "where did preferences come from?" Preferences are used as the basis of analysis in microeconomics, and macroeconomics tries to base itself on top of micro. The answers of the day were unsatisfying -- neuroscience has made great strides, but we still only see the observation without knowing the underlying system itself.
  - taffer 7y ago
    If the social sciences follow the scientific method, then I would call it science. It isn't a natural science, but a science.
    - tomrod 7y ago
      We use science to investigate, but not solely. It is not the only set of tools in the kit.
- chroem- 7y ago
  I think a good litmus test for whether a field of study should be classfied as philosophy or science, is whether or not experts within the field are able to achieve consensus. For economics being a strict science, there are a shocking number of experts who can't agree on the laws of economics.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    "This is how the world works", is science. "This is what we can do about it", is engineering. "This is what we should do about it", is politics. It's OK for scientists to work on engineering problems or on political policies, but we all need to be aware of what domain we are in.
  - taffer 7y ago
    Why is agreement a measure of how scientific a field is? I would argue that if there are no conflicting views, no progress can be made. I would also argue that the older a science is, the more consensus there will be for fundamental things, and since economics is a rather new science, there are fewer things economists can agree on. Besides, there are actually a lot of things that economists agree on: https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists-agree.html?m=1 https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economist...
    - chroem- 7y ago
      >since economics is a rather new science Isaac Newton's Principia was first published in English in 1728. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. That's a 48 year head start out of the nearly 250 years we have had both physics and economics.
      - QuesnayJr 7y ago
        Economics as a serious empirical science is a post-World War 2 phenomenon. Ptolemy had better data about the planets in the second century than we had about the economy in the early twentieth century.

taffer 7y ago

> Economics is not a science, economics uses science. So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. > The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. Also, economics is not a normative science like philosophy. Everything economics does is to say: "According to model M, if you do X in situation Y, then Z happens". If politicians turn it into austerity measures or deficit spending, then that' s politics, not economics. > because leading economist nobel prize winner said so. Be more specific. Who said what?

devoply 7y ago
> So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. 1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences. Please list a set of economic truths. Any set will be good enough as long as it can make reliable predictions that can be tested in the real world. > You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. You could, but the point is not to. Or if you want to then make sure that the science is predictive. > Be more specific. Who said what? When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive but at the same time can be shown to be unpredictive which proves that it is not fit for this task. Yet economists and their political allies continue to argue that it is. Maybe it's better than simply political arguments and maybe the justification for supporting the orthodoxy is in line with that. That you're scared of the political outcome and so economics is a safer option.
- taffer 7y ago
  > Please list a set of economic truths. Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either? > When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive... That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.
- gbacon 7y ago
  The physicist can drop a stone with a certain mass from a tower of a particular height and can predict that the next time she drops that rock from that tower, it will take the same amount of time to hit the ground. Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective. Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions. Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem Science is more than just high school physics problems.
tomrod 7y ago
Economist here! Economics is definitely not a science. It is a social science -- it can use the methodological tools of science to investigate and support theories applied in situations where the whole may behave predictably but individuals typically won't. We certainly test hypotheses, strategize, and theorize. But, contrary to physics or biology, there probably will never be a set of iron-clad rules and facts that can be derived. When I went through graduate school, the elephant in the room was "where did preferences come from?" Preferences are used as the basis of analysis in microeconomics, and macroeconomics tries to base itself on top of micro. The answers of the day were unsatisfying -- neuroscience has made great strides, but we still only see the observation without knowing the underlying system itself.
- taffer 7y ago
  If the social sciences follow the scientific method, then I would call it science. It isn't a natural science, but a science.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    We use science to investigate, but not solely. It is not the only set of tools in the kit.
chroem- 7y ago
I think a good litmus test for whether a field of study should be classfied as philosophy or science, is whether or not experts within the field are able to achieve consensus. For economics being a strict science, there are a shocking number of experts who can't agree on the laws of economics.
- Merrill 7y ago
  "This is how the world works", is science. "This is what we can do about it", is engineering. "This is what we should do about it", is politics. It's OK for scientists to work on engineering problems or on political policies, but we all need to be aware of what domain we are in.
- taffer 7y ago
  Why is agreement a measure of how scientific a field is? I would argue that if there are no conflicting views, no progress can be made. I would also argue that the older a science is, the more consensus there will be for fundamental things, and since economics is a rather new science, there are fewer things economists can agree on. Besides, there are actually a lot of things that economists agree on: https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists-agree.html?m=1 https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economist...
  - chroem- 7y ago
    >since economics is a rather new science Isaac Newton's Principia was first published in English in 1728. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. That's a 48 year head start out of the nearly 250 years we have had both physics and economics.
    - QuesnayJr 7y ago
      Economics as a serious empirical science is a post-World War 2 phenomenon. Ptolemy had better data about the planets in the second century than we had about the economy in the early twentieth century.