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1_2__3 | 8 years ago

Sure that's fine. Economics still isn't science, even by the relaxed definition.

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anigbrowl|8 years ago

Get over yourself; that's like saying Newton wasn't a good scientist because he was wrong about a lot of things. Economics, like sociology, is a young discipline that yields a lot of mistakes and goes down a lot of dead ends because it gropes towards an understanding of hard problems.

Criticizing economics is entirely valid. Pissing on it is not.

ianai|8 years ago

I think economics is in its vast infancy. It studies a highly complex system after all. It's constantly in danger of being coopted and manipulated toward ideological ends, too.

dsacco|8 years ago

"Relaxed definition" is a fairly pretentious way of describing social sciences. Is psychology also not a science, in your view?

Science as a process of study can be effectively applied to phenomena that are not as easy to rigorously measure as physics and chemistry.

I don't really understand where this view comes from. Is it a lack of exposure? There is a rich world of academic study in economics that is deeply complex, mathematical and even empirical, insofar as you can reasonably achieve in a domain that studies human behavior. There's more to it than the Pareto principle and "A Market for Lemons."

Studying the individual or aggregate behavior of human beings is inherently more difficult than inanimate objects. That doesn't mean you can't be rigorous with it.

Brotkrumen|8 years ago

By what relaxed definition? I didn't give a definition of "science" as that's kind of a hard problem smarter people than me tried to solve.

But hey, let's play a game: You tell me what's a necessary condition for something being a science and I'll tell you an instance where that condition as broken or a "non-science" that fulfills that condition.

Go!