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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What makes science science is not the ability to do experiments; experiments are a subset of the general case.
A more accurate description is that it is the ability to make *models* which give you *predictions* that you can later verify or reject. Experiments are simply a convenient way to do a lot of model-predict-verification cycles very quickly.
There are plenty of sciences, including very “hard” sciences, that can’t perform controlled experiments. We have no controlled experiments about plate tectonics (geology), planet formation (astrophysics), dinosaurs (paleontology), etc.
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