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Comment by maxverse | Hacker News Reader

> Economics is not a science. It is more like history, a set of useful methods but nonetheless highly colored by the current political mood.

> Crucially, economics also lacks the basic accountability mechanism that real sciences have: data. Bad theories in biology or physics disappear when new data repudiates them, but bad theories in economics never go away.

Lost me there. This is just sensationalist.

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It is sensationalist, but there is a small kernel of truth. Economists have major physics envy and want desperately to be a full mathematically based science, but it's more of a social science (as in not hard science). Doing regression models on the economy is obviously somewhat flawed. There is an experimental branch of economics that does repeatable experiments though, so some practicioners are probably pretty close.

There are a lot of things economists almost universally agree on (e.g. price caps bad), but there are big differences in schools of thought. Politicians can choose a la carte and can find an economist to agree with them on practically any policy.

As far as I understand, economics is a part of Social Science, not just resembling it. I don't think it can contend with the other two branches [1] per se - Formal and Natural, whose basis is different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branches_of_science

> Economists have major physics envy

All the rigor of pure mathematics, none of the predictive power of Physics.

The sciences, ranked: https://xkcd.com/435/#math-purity

Economics uses data, but unlike other sciences it is not falsifiable. If an economist makes a prediction that is incorrect, nothing happens. Instead they will always attribute the error to some unexpected factor that couldn't be accounted for (the "black swan" doctrine).

Peace, famously, is easy to judge objectively; that's why it gets a nobel

Kissinger still got it without peace in Vietnam.

Obama got it for winning an election while being half-white...

Actually Obama got ot for closing Guantanamo, bringing peace to Middle East and withdrawing from Afghanistan. Or for the hope that he would do any of that, can't remember exactly right now..

The interesting part is:

> Ben is in his second year of UChicago’s JD-MBA

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