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If you were to claim economics is not science because it rarely involves repeatable experiments, you would have to throw out a large chunk of what we commonly t
by skwirl 13y ago
If you were to claim economics is not science because it rarely involves repeatable experiments, you would have to throw out a large chunk of what we commonly think of as science. Did we discover that the moon orbits the earth with repeatable experiments? Did we discover black holes, the existence of dinosaurs, the big bang, the causes of earthquakes, the causes of volcanoes, the cause of hurricanes, etc. with repeatable experiments? Do you want to throw all that out as nonscientific nonsense?
It took us a long time to discover such basic things as the fact that the Earth goes around the sun despite the fact that people had been trying to figure it out for millenia. For much of that time, research was hampered by politics and the unwillingness of people to accept the consequences of possibilities beyond what was widely held as true, some of the same problems pinned by many on economics today.
Economics is a discipline that is really in its infancy. Like astronomy, it is going to rely on observation much more than experimentation. Like astronomy, it is still a science, and like astronomy, it always has been and always will be, even if we draw inconclusive, politically tainted, or wrong conclusions today.
- ThomPete 13y agoOf course you would and we should throw all those who are not proper sciences out. Come up with a new name as to not confuse and miss use. It belongs to sociology, psychology, anthropology and so on. Noting to be ashamed about but lets just call a spade a spade.
- mgraczyk 13y agoAll of those discoveries you listed were originally confirmed with repeatable experiments. In fact the the existence of black holes and the occurrence of the big bang were only hypothesized as explanations for the results of other repeatable scientific experiments. It wasn't hard for Galileo to show that the earth orbits the sun. His methods and results would still be acceptable to the scientific community if he did the experiments today. Just because the public didn't accept his work did not make it any less scientifically valid.
- kbenson 13y agoI think what you mean is they were eventually confirmed by repeatable experiments )even if eventually was shortly after the theory in some cases). Science begins with theory. It's appropriate to criticize people presenting theories as likely without evidence, but it's important to distinguish theory that is intended to be tested, but just can't or hasn't been yet from that which doesn't really expect to be tested.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoYou can practice economics as a science. For example, the book "Critical Mass" by Philip Ball ( http://www.philipball.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15:critical-mass-how-one-thing-leads-to-another&catid=3:books&Itemid=4 http://www.philipball.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&vie... ) includes a fair amount of economics from a thermodynamics perspective. However most of economics is not approached in this fashion and is more comparable to Axel Leijonhufvud's satire "Life Among The Econ" ( http://www.econ.ucla.edu/alleras/papers/life%20among%20the%20econs.%20leijonhufvud%201973.pdf http://www.econ.ucla.edu/alleras/papers/life%20among%20the%2... ).