From what we have been told, what makes science science is the ability to perform controlled experiments to verify or reject hypotheses. However due to the nature of economics and the fact that there are far too many factors like sociology and psychology to control for, it’s impossible to do controlled experiments in the economy. Why is it considered a branch of science?
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economics is considered a science because it is attempting to explain naturally occurring phenomena, i.e. the distribution of resources in society. Economists actually do run experiments when they are able to do so, and for more complicated questions where experiments are ill suited to answering them, they resort to observational and theoretical methods to answer their questions. This is the same process as any of the “hard” sciences, it just so happens that many economic questions are impractical to explore experimentally, but the approach is the same
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