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.
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.
There are actually a lot of parts of economics which is more numerical based. For example, inflation and unemployment are numbers that can be controlled in a contained area by different policies.
For example, the law of supply and demand is proven in most experiments, and companies do this all the time. Reduce the price of a good, such as during a sale, and the quantity increases. Adjust the price in different regions, and the quantity sold changes.
Real economics is mostly a numerical science, but only works on a scale large enough to reduce randomness. So like towns with 1000 people, not a local store where the owner has direct relationships with everyone.
edit: BA economics, berkeley, MS chemical engineer, works at PGE managing power by controlling prices.
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.
>From what we have been told, what makes science science is the ability to perform controlled experiments to verify or reject hypotheses.
There fact is that this is just wrong. In medicine, for instance, only a small part of the scientific literature is randomized controlled trials.
Besides, you can very well run experiments in economics, only most of the time it would be microeconomics.
I guess in high school I was also taught of the “scientific method” and controlled experiments were given as the primary example and it may have sounded a bit like that was the definition of science. There’s no such clear cut definition of science.
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.
Most people do not consider it as such. They use lots of numbers math and create models and there are a lot of quantitative aspects of it and some narrow parts if it are scientific, but overall it us not a science any more than political science is.
You added the “controlled” part to the definition of science.
Take it out, as you should, and economics is unquestionably a science.
Unfortunately, it can be an especially navel-gazing one. When I was studying it at Harvard, the professors loved to build detailed numeric models based on, say, 5 assumptions, none of which was even close to being true. Then others would critique or expand those models. You could build an entire career without actually considering the real world at all. That fact, among others, led me away from economics as a pursuit.
After I graduated, the University of Chicago decided to actually consider the real world as it built its economic models, and several Nobel prizes were the result. I just shook my head.
Economics is a science. It just doesn’t look like one because its highly tied up in competitive endeavors like making money and winning elections.
economics is considered a science because it is attempting to explain naturally occurring phenomena, i.e. the distribution of resources in society. Economists actually do run experiments when they are able to do so, and for more complicated questions where experiments are ill suited to answering them, they resort to observational and theoretical methods to answer their questions. This is the same process as any of the “hard” sciences, it just so happens that many economic questions are impractical to explore experimentally, but the approach is the same
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