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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IMO, it’s not science.
The main reason it is not: it’s an inevitable feedback loop. It’s the study of how people, in various large groups, make decisions based on superstition and emotion. As soon as you publish anything, you’ve altered what you’ve studied by changing the body of superstition.
For example, it’s economic cannon that raising interest rates will slow inflation. Is this because of actual cause and effect? Unlikeky. More likely it causes the large number of people who informally collude to raise prices (when they can) to stop so the few people who collude to control interest rates will stop raising interest rates.
It’s pretty much 100% interpreting correlation as causation.
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