Of course it is a science, but most critics of it should remember that it is a social science, and comes with all of the difficulty of proof that all social sciences suffer from. There are some common principles of the field that have strong theoretical and empirical foundations, and the rest of them are trying to make do with the constraints forced upon them by virtue of working with humans.
The principle of Supply and Demand is one that has so much historical empirical evidence that it might as well be called a physical law...but we can't call it that because the principle relies on human cognition, culture, and other non-deterministic influences. Trade theory also has an extremely strong empirical evidence. A lot of microeconomics is also very emprical, and even has a lot of experimental control mechanisms for which macroeconomics does not. Still, we can accept these ideas as true beyond any reasonable doubt. However, we have an extremely long way to go before the rest of the field catches up to the same standards.
> Of course it is a science, but most critics of it should remember that it is a social science, and comes with all of the difficulty of proof that all social sciences suffer from.
This argues that science is sort of an ice cream store with dozens of flavors. But in the science store, there's just one flavor. Its ingredients are evidence and falsifiability. Either you can test an idea against reality unambiguously, and potentially falsify it, or you cannot. Fields that cannot produce unambiguous falsifications, and that won't discard failed theories, are not sciences. On that basis, economics is not a science.
Proving a theory true is not in science's purview -- nothing is every proven true once and for all, and all ideas are perpetually open to falsification in the face of new evidence. But the ability to prove a theory false is a must. No falsifiability, no science.
"No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion." -- David Hume
Assertions that 'economics is not a science' are almost certain to be followed by some confident conclusion specifically related to economics that sounds like common sense, but contradicts anything that makes sense after applying any rigor.
The problem with stating that 'economics is science' is the strong underlying ideological and political bias. The human factor is always recursive : the very beliefs of what is natural (aka: science) in a given culture structures the way the society works. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered slavery natural, so they had slaves and you could therefore empirically/scientifically prove the basic laws of slavery... Abandoning the way you see society to science implies the way it works is deterministic and thus cannot be changed. You basically abandon freedom to ideology with a fake science mustache.
Which "law" of supply and demand are you thinking of? To my knowledge, there is no single such law, just a general rule of thumb. Simple mathmatical models in economy, in which "laws" can be proven often don't predict the real markets all that well.
Questions like "is X a science" looks often like the "True Scotsman" fallacy
Or better, if you want to keep strict, to things that can have an experiment "perfectly reproduced" infinite times, then you have physics and chemistry for that.
Biology? No. A simple example, the LD for a substance. At LD50 you have 50% of samples dying. Here you have a substance with a very strong effect (death), at a high dose (because it kills 50%) and still, the chance of it effecting the sample is 50% (ok, 50% by design of experiment, and you'll have an spectrum of reactions)?
An electron suffers a force inside an electrical field, 100% (exactly) of the time. Some things have some probabilities, like nuclear decay, where it decays to substance 1 A1% of the time and to substance 2 A2% of the time, but that's it, no in-betweens.
> Questions like "is X a science" looks often like the "True Scotsman" fallacy
True about Scotsmen, false about science. Science is easy to define, therefore easy to detect.
Either a field has testable, falsifiable ideas -- ideas that can be compared to reality in practical tests, indeed are compared to reality, and are promptly discarded if they fail the test -- or they do not. End of story, fini, full stop.
> Biology? No.
Biology, yes. Either DNA is the source of heredity or it isn't. It's testable and falsifiable. Either natural selection produces new species or it doesn't. Again, testable and falsifiable. Biology can make and test empirical claims, and it does, and it discards those ideas that fail the test. That's science.
Look at prions. At first no one knew what was going on, so they did some research. They took body fluid from one victim and passed it through a filter that would have stopped a virus, but the prions got through. This forced the explanation that something smaller than a virus was reproducing and causing fatal illnesses. This led to a much better assessment of what prions are. A falsifiable test was performed, the test succeeded, prions are real. Mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and a handful of other diseases would have remained unexplained, except for the science.
> An electron suffers a force inside an electrical field, 100% (exactly) of the time.
It's easy to describe physics as a science, for the reason that it is very much a science. What's hard is comparing physics to other endeavors that might or might not be sciences. But there's no reason to use physics as a science yardstick -- all one needs to do is ask, "what theories have you tested, falsified, and discarded?"
> Biology? No. A simple example, the LD for a substance. At LD50 you have 50% of samples dying. Here you have a substance with a very strong effect (death), at a high dose (because it kills 50%) and still, the chance of it effecting the sample is 50% (ok, 50% by design of experiment, and you'll have an spectrum of reactions)?
Every living being have different physiology, so there are differences in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics; all of that is explainable at molecular level. LD50 is just statistical indicator, you can even explain why something is lethal at high dose, why is cure at medium dose and why dont play any role on low dose.
An electron may in some abstract sense suffer that force 100% of the time, but that has no bearing on whether your specific measurement context has similar confidence.
Your argument is sophomoric. Read Popper, Jaynes, any number of other sources.
If your argument was true, science would be entirely true, uncontroversial, complete, and done. Clearly it is not. I wonder what is lacking here: the body of science, or your conception of scientific epistemology.
I'm astonished that these questions get asked again and again, about fields that are obviously not sciences.
Fields that can and do test their theories against reality in practical, empirical tests, that discard falsified theories, and that have a corpus of supporting evidence that forces all similarly equipped observers to the same conclusion, are sciences. The rest are pseudosciences whose status is clearly shown by innumerable articles whose titles end in a question mark.
I agree with your definition mostly; however, I disagree with your conclusion. In this sense, economics is a science.
Having a corpus of poor quality articles does not exclude you from being a science.
Having dissenting groups, and areas where existing evidence permits more than one conclusion, does not exclude you from being a science. Quite the opposite: if there was no dissent, there would be no science.
You can't apply the scientific method and when coming back in the real world leaving models and presumptions aside you see that economists never play an important role. They easily justify their failures no matter how big. You can't even trust history books to tell you if the X policy was a success or failure.
In order to understand economics in my view, you have to know how politics work. Politicians and nations or people in power at any given time can turn a debt to 0 or to a war. Of course in a democracy it's more complicated, but generally that's the main idea. The their puppets try to justify the move.
It is what is happening in Greece, in the USA, in Italy and in other parts of world.
Rationality and math has little to do with economics. So since economists never predict anything really (when they do they get a Nobel), I hardly see this as a science.
As for the argument that physics or biology is not a science, I can know this: the same experiment can done time and again giving the same result. Try it in real-life economics...
Lacking predictive power is indeed a big issue of economics.
However you are completely wrong about sovereign debt. It is a minor issue, and defaults almost never result in wars. Argentina defaulted or restructured its debt 4 times since 1980.
I love to hear Schiller speak, even though I don't subscribe to his particular behaviorist ideas (they are quite outside the mainstream of academic research). He is very measured in his criticism of the mainstream, and his article is a very fair summary (in my opinion) of how scientific mainstream economics is. Schiller is a moderate dissenter in that he thinks the current ration-agent-model approach is flawed, bout doesn't advocate abandoning mathematical models.
Like Schiller, I believe that it is possible to test and validate theories, but at the same time we cannot have the same certainty as in physics, and the "irreducibly human element" will also prevent the same deep mathematical theories that we see in physics, ever being developed for economics.
Economist call their discipline "social science" basically because they suffer from "science envy". They want to believe that there are simple things like "water molecule is the bonding of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen". But in economy they are not, as economy is about the most flexible thing on Earth, humans and the relationship between them.
Economy is about dogma, there are Keynesians dogma followers(that look like never read a book of Keynes), Austrian dogma followers, and so on. Nothing to do with science but with power grabbing. Today all institutions are dominated by keynesians ands as everybody can see they are making the world a worse place.
It's Science as much as any social science is Science.
The only reason we can't transform social sciences into hard sciences is because it would be horrifically cruel and unethical to exert rigid, inflexible rules on thinking, breathing, feeling human beings.
You can't turn human beings into raw predictable numbers without killing them, or throwing them in jail (however intangible such a prison might be, loss of choice and free will is enslavement).
It is a social science with assumptions on how things works.
A lot of economic theories are just that assumptions, assumptions on how the market works.
If you have the time watch Professor Steve Keens one of the economists who predicted the 2008 subprime bubble criticize
main stream economics.
Especially the Federal reserve system which is privately owned by the biggest banks. Read on Edward Griffins google the creature from Jekyll island. In that information you will find that the FED was created by a among others senator Aldrich who's daughter was married to one of the banks who created the FED.
Thus private banks create debt out of thin air more now so than ever they are backed up by central banks. In the European central bank, the head of the bank comes from Goldman Sachs. There is a documentary called 97% owned which states 97% of all money in circulation are now debt just 3% is cash.
No. Social sciences aren't sciences. They're "Social" sciences. That doesn't keep it from straying into the real sciences, just like computer science sometimes strays into real science.
You can hardly innovate in economics if politics don't follow.
Economical decisions are so much entangled and tainted with politics, that's a big reason why it's not really scientific. The theory is sound, but practice is awful for many reasons, mostly political and because of the human factor.
Capitalism is a decent and somewhat balanced practice of economics, but the fact that it's not a hard science shows that there is a disconnect between theory and practice.
I once thought that large-scale macro-economics was derived from empirical behavioral economics and microeconomics, similar to the way thermodynamics is derived from basic laws of physics (via the methods of statistical mechanics). That's not what was done, but maybe someday...
Also, imagine a world where macroeconomic models get thrown out, or at least modified, when their predictions fail. Wouldn't that be neat?
I consider economics to be more like a branch of philosophy than a science. The way to judge a good economic theory from bad one is to evaluate the soundness of its arguments. Historical data can never confirm or refute an economic theory because people have free will, and can act any way they choose.
There are lots of non-experimental subjects at any university -- history, archeology, etc.
The ideologists wanting to demote economics never seem to want to also throw geology out of the university.
(In the future, some gigantic geo engineering might make geology experimental, the same goes for "perfect" computer models of society and economic experiments. Don't hold your breath, unless we argue inside such a model now; wonder what the hypothesis is? :-) )
Take all the fast food workers that strikes to raise their minimum wage from ~$7 to $15/hour because they need to work more than 8h or are dependent on food stamps.
Many (most?) economists think that that will have disastrous consequences for the US economy. Iff economy is a science, then their view should be taken into account because it is based on solid scientifically-backed evidence. Exactly like how you would take the view of climate scientists very seriously if you knew climate science was a real science.
But if economy is not a science, that means there is no evidence either or. Then you have no one else results to rely on and have to use your own common sense to analyze questions like the above one.
What does that link have to do with your question?
To answer your question: some subdisciplines of psychology are (e.g. biological psychology), and some are not (e.g. psychoanalysis). From what I've seen, all world-class universities emphasize the former; the latter is only taught in passing in psych 101 as history.
I've yet to see anybody seriously discuss psychoanalysis nowadays outside of... well, to be honest, women's studies. Of course, that field never claimed to be a science. Oh, Žižek does too.
Yet more intelligentsia bullshit from the Guardian. No. Economics is categorically not a science. It's not even a social science. It is, at best, one of the humanities.
[+] [-] saosebastiao|12 years ago|reply
The principle of Supply and Demand is one that has so much historical empirical evidence that it might as well be called a physical law...but we can't call it that because the principle relies on human cognition, culture, and other non-deterministic influences. Trade theory also has an extremely strong empirical evidence. A lot of microeconomics is also very emprical, and even has a lot of experimental control mechanisms for which macroeconomics does not. Still, we can accept these ideas as true beyond any reasonable doubt. However, we have an extremely long way to go before the rest of the field catches up to the same standards.
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
This argues that science is sort of an ice cream store with dozens of flavors. But in the science store, there's just one flavor. Its ingredients are evidence and falsifiability. Either you can test an idea against reality unambiguously, and potentially falsify it, or you cannot. Fields that cannot produce unambiguous falsifications, and that won't discard failed theories, are not sciences. On that basis, economics is not a science.
Proving a theory true is not in science's purview -- nothing is every proven true once and for all, and all ideas are perpetually open to falsification in the face of new evidence. But the ability to prove a theory false is a must. No falsifiability, no science.
"No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion." -- David Hume
http://xkcd.com/435/
[+] [-] rz2k|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlysisto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesianhorse|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|12 years ago|reply
Or better, if you want to keep strict, to things that can have an experiment "perfectly reproduced" infinite times, then you have physics and chemistry for that.
Biology? No. A simple example, the LD for a substance. At LD50 you have 50% of samples dying. Here you have a substance with a very strong effect (death), at a high dose (because it kills 50%) and still, the chance of it effecting the sample is 50% (ok, 50% by design of experiment, and you'll have an spectrum of reactions)?
An electron suffers a force inside an electrical field, 100% (exactly) of the time. Some things have some probabilities, like nuclear decay, where it decays to substance 1 A1% of the time and to substance 2 A2% of the time, but that's it, no in-betweens.
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
True about Scotsmen, false about science. Science is easy to define, therefore easy to detect.
Either a field has testable, falsifiable ideas -- ideas that can be compared to reality in practical tests, indeed are compared to reality, and are promptly discarded if they fail the test -- or they do not. End of story, fini, full stop.
> Biology? No.
Biology, yes. Either DNA is the source of heredity or it isn't. It's testable and falsifiable. Either natural selection produces new species or it doesn't. Again, testable and falsifiable. Biology can make and test empirical claims, and it does, and it discards those ideas that fail the test. That's science.
Look at prions. At first no one knew what was going on, so they did some research. They took body fluid from one victim and passed it through a filter that would have stopped a virus, but the prions got through. This forced the explanation that something smaller than a virus was reproducing and causing fatal illnesses. This led to a much better assessment of what prions are. A falsifiable test was performed, the test succeeded, prions are real. Mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and a handful of other diseases would have remained unexplained, except for the science.
> An electron suffers a force inside an electrical field, 100% (exactly) of the time.
It's easy to describe physics as a science, for the reason that it is very much a science. What's hard is comparing physics to other endeavors that might or might not be sciences. But there's no reason to use physics as a science yardstick -- all one needs to do is ask, "what theories have you tested, falsified, and discarded?"
http://xkcd.com/435/
[+] [-] kkedacic|12 years ago|reply
Every living being have different physiology, so there are differences in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics; all of that is explainable at molecular level. LD50 is just statistical indicator, you can even explain why something is lethal at high dose, why is cure at medium dose and why dont play any role on low dose.
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|12 years ago|reply
Your argument is sophomoric. Read Popper, Jaynes, any number of other sources.
If your argument was true, science would be entirely true, uncontroversial, complete, and done. Clearly it is not. I wonder what is lacking here: the body of science, or your conception of scientific epistemology.
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
Fields that can and do test their theories against reality in practical, empirical tests, that discard falsified theories, and that have a corpus of supporting evidence that forces all similarly equipped observers to the same conclusion, are sciences. The rest are pseudosciences whose status is clearly shown by innumerable articles whose titles end in a question mark.
http://xkcd.com/435/
[+] [-] ronaldx|12 years ago|reply
Having a corpus of poor quality articles does not exclude you from being a science. Having dissenting groups, and areas where existing evidence permits more than one conclusion, does not exclude you from being a science. Quite the opposite: if there was no dissent, there would be no science.
[+] [-] eru|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
In order to understand economics in my view, you have to know how politics work. Politicians and nations or people in power at any given time can turn a debt to 0 or to a war. Of course in a democracy it's more complicated, but generally that's the main idea. The their puppets try to justify the move.
It is what is happening in Greece, in the USA, in Italy and in other parts of world.
Rationality and math has little to do with economics. So since economists never predict anything really (when they do they get a Nobel), I hardly see this as a science.
As for the argument that physics or biology is not a science, I can know this: the same experiment can done time and again giving the same result. Try it in real-life economics...
[+] [-] yetanotherphd|12 years ago|reply
However you are completely wrong about sovereign debt. It is a minor issue, and defaults almost never result in wars. Argentina defaulted or restructured its debt 4 times since 1980.
[+] [-] yetanotherphd|12 years ago|reply
Like Schiller, I believe that it is possible to test and validate theories, but at the same time we cannot have the same certainty as in physics, and the "irreducibly human element" will also prevent the same deep mathematical theories that we see in physics, ever being developed for economics.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] forgottenpaswrd|12 years ago|reply
Economist call their discipline "social science" basically because they suffer from "science envy". They want to believe that there are simple things like "water molecule is the bonding of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen". But in economy they are not, as economy is about the most flexible thing on Earth, humans and the relationship between them.
Economy is about dogma, there are Keynesians dogma followers(that look like never read a book of Keynes), Austrian dogma followers, and so on. Nothing to do with science but with power grabbing. Today all institutions are dominated by keynesians ands as everybody can see they are making the world a worse place.
[+] [-] downer99|12 years ago|reply
The only reason we can't transform social sciences into hard sciences is because it would be horrifically cruel and unethical to exert rigid, inflexible rules on thinking, breathing, feeling human beings.
You can't turn human beings into raw predictable numbers without killing them, or throwing them in jail (however intangible such a prison might be, loss of choice and free will is enslavement).
[+] [-] acd|12 years ago|reply
If you have the time watch Professor Steve Keens one of the economists who predicted the 2008 subprime bubble criticize main stream economics.
Especially the Federal reserve system which is privately owned by the biggest banks. Read on Edward Griffins google the creature from Jekyll island. In that information you will find that the FED was created by a among others senator Aldrich who's daughter was married to one of the banks who created the FED.
Thus private banks create debt out of thin air more now so than ever they are backed up by central banks. In the European central bank, the head of the bank comes from Goldman Sachs. There is a documentary called 97% owned which states 97% of all money in circulation are now debt just 3% is cash.
Ever wonder how the rich gets richer?
[+] [-] grogenaut|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j2kun|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|12 years ago|reply
Economical decisions are so much entangled and tainted with politics, that's a big reason why it's not really scientific. The theory is sound, but practice is awful for many reasons, mostly political and because of the human factor.
Capitalism is a decent and somewhat balanced practice of economics, but the fact that it's not a hard science shows that there is a disconnect between theory and practice.
[+] [-] troymc|12 years ago|reply
Also, imagine a world where macroeconomic models get thrown out, or at least modified, when their predictions fail. Wouldn't that be neat?
[+] [-] tomcdonnell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jahaja|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_economy
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berntb|12 years ago|reply
The ideologists wanting to demote economics never seem to want to also throw geology out of the university.
(In the future, some gigantic geo engineering might make geology experimental, the same goes for "perfect" computer models of society and economic experiments. Don't hold your breath, unless we argue inside such a model now; wonder what the hypothesis is? :-) )
[+] [-] yason|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjourne|12 years ago|reply
Many (most?) economists think that that will have disastrous consequences for the US economy. Iff economy is a science, then their view should be taken into account because it is based on solid scientifically-backed evidence. Exactly like how you would take the view of climate scientists very seriously if you knew climate science was a real science.
But if economy is not a science, that means there is no evidence either or. Then you have no one else results to rely on and have to use your own common sense to analyze questions like the above one.
[+] [-] brianbreslin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmpk2k|12 years ago|reply
To answer your question: some subdisciplines of psychology are (e.g. biological psychology), and some are not (e.g. psychoanalysis). From what I've seen, all world-class universities emphasize the former; the latter is only taught in passing in psych 101 as history.
I've yet to see anybody seriously discuss psychoanalysis nowadays outside of... well, to be honest, women's studies. Of course, that field never claimed to be a science. Oh, Žižek does too.
[+] [-] _Simon|12 years ago|reply