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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While the scientific method, rational thinking, philosophy, etc have all proven incredibly useful to finding the truth, that “truth” is defined by one thing: predictive utility. What makes economics science is its ability to make predictions about the future with better accuracy than chance should allow.
Incidentally, this is why psuedosciences are not science. They simply don’t work any better than guessing randomly. If astrology could make predictions about the future of the economy better than modern economics, then the apparent idiocy behind it becomes irrelevant. If it works, it works. Because it doesn’t, no justifications for it will ever hold water. It doesn’t work, and so it has no value.
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