> I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. ... we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.
If I'm understanding you, this is your main point: social sciences have a weaker return on investment than medical sciences (and presumably some others?). Here's a counterargument.
There are some fields that study universal facts about biology or physics. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, these will largely yield similar results that can be applied anywhere. There's a small amount of value to replicating research done in one population on a different population, but humans are broadly similar enough that it's not strictly necessary.
On the other hand, there are fields where the location of the research absolutely does matter. This is true of the social sciences. Conclusions drawn about the functioning of one human culture are not broadly translatable to other cultures.
This means that even if the net return on investment for medicine is higher (and it probably is, precisely because it translates to more people), it's actually more valuable for small countries to pay for their own social sciences than their own medical research. They can always take advantage of what others are learning about biology, but if they don't research the way that New Zealand works then no one will.
Maybe you should have taken it in school when you had the chance.
I learned very little, certainly learned more just reading the books than going to class. Class was largely useless.
Philosophy helped me to think critically and find edge cases. Psych taught me about different parts of the brain and their functions. Soci taught me my professor was a giant fraud and the entire discipline was a 'solution' looking for a problem.
Rejecting empirically-proven supply-demand pricing models (no DSGE, I’m talking supply chain models that predict end prices) because it’s politically inconvenient is exactly the sort of nonsense the social sciences are criticised for.
I thought we were discussing science here? Get out of here. Go read some Hume.
It's pointed phrasing, but it works. When we have overwhelming evidence for a phenomenon that has solid theoretical foundations, it's fair to say it's empirically proven. Not absolutely or mathematically proven. But if you've read Hume or even Popper, you already know that.
The core point remains the case: a lot of economics is uncomfortable for some people (there isn't a strong partisan leaning to this tendency, in my experience) and so they come up with elaborate arguments for why that evidence should be discarded. The top comment illustrates this [1].