3 ms·

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 ach

• 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.