This problem cuts across many areas at the moment. Economics isn't the only thing.
Also, it could be argued that the climate change problem is really a socioeconomic one. I wouldn't say this has been neglected, but berating consumers and producers for what is more of a systemic problem isn't the most helpful thing.
But then later the author rails against how economists are too beholden to their own "bias" and "political" beliefs. So which is it? Are we to utilize evidence to help justify our decisions, or should we base our policy decisions off of our gut? It sounds like the author prefers that we defer our social policy decisions to philosophers, a profession even less beholden to hard evidence to back their conclusions. But bias and political beliefs are simply an extension of personal philosophy, so... you would just end up right back where we started trying to reduce personal preference leaking into hard facts and poisoning the problem-solving process.
It's one thing to say that we shouldn't elevate scientific findings and theories (and in turn their founders) to dogmatic levels. Science is a technique to offer answers to problems; nothing more. The technique and its findings can be incorrect or misused or simply misunderstood, but I don't see how the alternatives proposed are any better. Yes, it would be nice if we (and by extension, our elected officials) could have come to the conclusion about the ill effects of the draft based on an argument like "it's bad to force people to go to war for a cause they might not believe in", but that is an open-ended philosophical question and is why we have a democratic process in the first place. We all get a say in what our values are and how our public policy aligns with those values.
I feel like the author does exactly what he argues against: hand-picks a number of data points (very loose ones in this case), packages them up into some kind of position that backs his worldview that things are not going the way he would prefer, and then uses that to argue a deeper philosophical point rather than just get at the concept that scientific findings can often be abused (maybe because that is a much harder problem to solve than just saying economists suck).
Don't even get me started on the fact that the author refers to economists as "privileged" and infers that they are a social class which "came to enter policymaking and insinuate themselves into the governing class". As if people in the field of economics are just born into this powerful bubble in society and should shut their mouths because they simply got lucky in life; not that many of them worked hard to get in to their current profession.
So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment.
> The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker.
You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. Also, economics is not a normative science like philosophy. Everything economics does is to say: "According to model M, if you do X in situation Y, then Z happens". If politicians turn it into austerity measures or deficit spending, then that' s politics, not economics.
> because leading economist nobel prize winner said so.
Be more specific. Who said what?
1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.
Please list a set of economic truths. Any set will be good enough as long as it can make reliable predictions that can be tested in the real world.
> You can use any science to wrap up political decisions.
You could, but the point is not to. Or if you want to then make sure that the science is predictive.
> Be more specific. Who said what?
When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive but at the same time can be shown to be unpredictive which proves that it is not fit for this task. Yet economists and their political allies continue to argue that it is. Maybe it's better than simply political arguments and maybe the justification for supporting the orthodoxy is in line with that. That you're scared of the political outcome and so economics is a safer option.
Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either?
> When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive...
That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.
Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective.
Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions.
Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem
Science is more than just high school physics problems.
Economics is definitely not a science. It is a social science -- it can use the methodological tools of science to investigate and support theories applied in situations where the whole may behave predictably but individuals typically won't.
We certainly test hypotheses, strategize, and theorize. But, contrary to physics or biology, there probably will never be a set of iron-clad rules and facts that can be derived.
When I went through graduate school, the elephant in the room was "where did preferences come from?" Preferences are used as the basis of analysis in microeconomics, and macroeconomics tries to base itself on top of micro. The answers of the day were unsatisfying -- neuroscience has made great strides, but we still only see the observation without knowing the underlying system itself.
It's OK for scientists to work on engineering problems or on political policies, but we all need to be aware of what domain we are in.
Besides, there are actually a lot of things that economists agree on: https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economist...
Isaac Newton's Principia was first published in English in 1728. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. That's a 48 year head start out of the nearly 250 years we have had both physics and economics.