The topic is, “Should we think of economics as a science?”
Against
Thinking of economics as a science is incorrect as a description and unwise as a prescription. As a description, the claims that economists make are not as robust as claims made in natural sciences. As a prescription, claiming that economics is a science leads to a belief in the capability of economic policy-making that is unwarranted and dangerous.
For
It is true that it is not possible in economics to make claims that are as precise and verifiable as in chemistry of physics. But economics still contains valuable laws, such as the law of supply and demand. And economists still should attempt to follow the scientific method as best they can. If no one believes that economics is a science, then that opens things up for all sorts of bad intuition and nonsense to enter the policy debates.
I have more thoughts, but nobody reads blogs on Thanksgiving, anyway.
Arnold:
I detected only one obvious flaw in your post.
Happy Thanksgiving!
(One of the things I’m most thankful for, today and year-round, are the ideas and opinions of smart folks whose ideas and opinions I’ve come to respect – because they compel me to THINK, whether I agree wth them or not.)
We should not think of this as a binary question. The surest way to get the wrong answer is to ask the wrong question.
The answer to any question is better thought of as being more or less amenable to scientific approaches. The approaches of various disciplines and various people and various studies should be thought of as more or less scientific along a broad spectrum.
In line with a post above, I would like to express my thanks for your many thought-provoking and insightful posts. You brighten my day. Wishing you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving.
I do.
Thank you for your blog. I am grateful.
I’d like to see it on one of those intelligence squared debates.
I’ll add my voice to the chorus: I am thankful for this blog.
Like the others I’m up reading too.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I’m reading on Turkey Thursday. Plus, the blog post is supposed to prompt comments well after the day it is posted, right? (I am skeptical of the overall sensibility of this view, because commenters want to be read by others, not just Arnold, and the traffic pattern is well into the long tail within a week of posting)
Science is just a method of explaining or predicting things about the world. There are other methods, they don’t seem to be as useful, but people seem to manage with them. We need a post-enlightenment understanding that is not anti-science but anti-scientism, that doesn’t glorify science like some… mood affiliation. Economics is the only field that recognizes the failures of the enlightenment and scientism, because at its core it recognizes that scientists, as humans as part of an economy and political structure, have incentives against the truth and has a framework for how knowledge can be an illusion. Therefore, economics is the best science.
Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for your writing (this blog and your essays and reviews and books).
Unlike physics and chemistry and electrical engineering and computer science economics and other social disciplines deal mostly with intrinsically vague objects and processes. Vagueness in human affairs is built-in, it is neither noise nor an imperfect reflection of true but hidden non-vague objects and processes.
For this reason economics laws are not fundamental and will never be fundamental. Rather, they are heuristics, rules of thumb, or various intuitions packaged in a compact and presumably logical form. The law of supply and demand is such packaged intuition, but it can also be derived from or, rather, made compatible with other observations and more fundamental laws describing human behaviour and decision making. As long as we keep track of our assumptions and limitations and boundaries of our knowledge and intrinsic vagueness of objects and processes, we can reason about “factors that determine the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services”.
“but nobody reads blogs on Thanksgiving, anyway”
Don’t be so parochial, not all of your readers are in the US!
Every other science seems to advance with advancements in their measurement technologies. And sometimes 8t goes backwards. In biology people are now questioning assumptions of how precise immunolabeling is. It will work out. Perhaps economics is just relatively hard to measure.
And Happy Thanksgiving. And who are these people who don’t read blogs between the football and turkey?
And yes, maybe calling something a science at least provides some aspirational value.