I’m starting to believe that Economists are not scientists. They like to pretend they are, using formulas and graphs and stuff (even though they get the axes mixed up). But I really think that in the end they are just waving around saying “look at me”.
It sure seems to me like economists disagree a lot. One says that if you do one thing, then such and such will happen. Another says that if you do it, something else will happen. Well why don’t you do an experiment? Why not set a control and only alter one variable? Create a hypothesis and attempt to invalidate it. Is this so hard? That’s how real scientists work. Economists like to espouse things, and then explain retroactively why something might have happened, but you can’t be sure because there are really so many factors involved. What? That’s not science.
Now I realize that real scientists have their disagreements also. But there is a system in place to resolve these called the scientific method. If you think that evolution is a crackpot idea, well then go out and prove it. Come up with some experiment that proves what you think, and you’ll be famous. You don’t think relativity is anything but hogwash? Knock yourself out. There is a codified system for proving and disproving these things.
So until someone is able to show me how, exactly, economics is a science and not an art, I will continue to think that most of them are full of it, and also, very pompous about being full of it.
5 Comments
Your logic is a ways off here. You compare an economist using models to make predictions about a complex system to a scientist setting one control and altering one variable. In reality, a more apt comparison is to a meteorologist, who is also a scientist but, like an economist, works with a system so complex and with so many variables that models and approximations are all they have to go on.
As for experimenting on the economy, what “control” do you use when considering that the market consists of millions of independent people and organizations that act illogically? There is no baseline, and there are no real patterns, which is why it’s impossible to predict the stock market.
I disagree with you completely. If it can’t be tested then it isn’t science. Real scientists deal with complex systems also but are able to make sense of them. Clearly there is more to evolution and the such as one hypothesis. They built up of many of those to make the complex system we call evolution. But each part can be verified experimentally.
The very fact that humans behave illogically means that economics can’t be understood like physics. That’s my only point.
Sorry for the choppy nature of that post but I’m on my iPhone.
Oh I agree that if it can’t be tested it isn’t science, otherwise you open the door to all sorts of pseudoscientific crap (and intelligent design). But there’s a difference between an untestable argument by definition (“Anything we can’t explain is due to an invisible, omnipotent God”) and a system that, to make accurate predictions about, would require so many variables that in order to extrapolate would require more informational storage than atoms in the universe, as has been said about predicting weather or the stock market with 100% certainty.
I agree with Nathan. Economists are more like Sociologists – guessing, albeit educated guessing, as to what all these pieces of infomration mean. There is too much opinion in the “science” of econmoy. And though they may strive to be like Physicists in actuality they are purveyors of complex systems and conjecture. I couldn’t do it but to call it a science is really a stretch. Maybe a social Science?