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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There is a long-running debate about what exactly science is, how it should be done, and what things should be considered sciences. No conensus has ever really been reached on any of those questions. Science is huge and complicated, with different fields functioning in very different ways.
> 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
There are a couple of problems with this objection. First, there are some areas of economics where people do perform experiments. These areas of economics focus on small-scale economic interactions and don’t tend to get as much mainstream attention as the areas of economics that purport to tell us about, say, why recessions happen or how governments should set their tax rates. And you could certainly question how rigorous and valuable these economic experiments are, but they do happen.
Second, there are many areas of the natural sciences where people don’t really perform experiments. There are fields that are primarily theoretical, where most researchers spend their careers proposing and exploring different models, or studying the behaviour of already accepted models, without going anywhere near real data or experiments.
Also, I think it’s a little bit frustrating when people act as if it’s bad if something isn’t a science. Most people would agree that music isn’t a science, but most people also think music is great. Even if we were to accept that economics isn’t a science, that doesn’t imply there is anything wrong with it. So I think it’s a slightly strange line of attack. Economics has plenty of problems – it’s fractious, it’s controversial, many of its predictions have turned out to be false, it has had few major success stories, and it has arguably been used to do great harm. It has also been far more accepting towards full-blown cranks (e.g. the Austrian school weirdos) than most other fields are towards their cranks. If you want to critique economics, there is a lot of material to work with before resorting to esoteric philosophical discussions about what is or isn’t science.
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