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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Science isn’t just about controlled experiments. Large portions of biology, physics and geology (to name a few) are done with observational studies rather than experiments.
Economists generate theoretical models of the economy. Most of them include at least one testable hypothesis. Economists rarely conduct lab experiments because doing so is often prohibitively expensive and/or unethical (you can’t screw around with a nations economy just to learn what happens). But there is an insane amount of data to work with.
You’re correct that it can be difficult to interpret economic data. As you pointed out, there are often missing factors. The more subtle problem is that known factors often interact in unexpected ways. It can also be difficult to establish causality.
But there is a whole branch of statistics (called econometrics) that deals with exactly those problems. Those techniques are far from perfect but they have a strong tack record of getting us repeatable results.
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