The term "economic sciences" is about as appropriate as the term "sanitation engineers." No controlled experiments = not a science. Relevant: https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm.
"An observational science is a science where it is not possible to construct controlled experiments in the area under study. For example, in astronomy, it is not possible to create or manipulate stars or galaxies in order to observe what happens. Other examples of necessarily observational sciences include geology, paleontology, epidemiology, and much of the social sciences."
Astronomy and geology, on the hand, have theories that explain a larger set of observable behavior. Maybe you still have unknowns, like wtf is a quasar, but you can mostly point to any star or planet and have astronomy tell you how it works. If I pick a random human society and provide a brief description of it to a social scientist, my confidence that they will then accurately predict other facets of that society is pretty damn low.
Example climate science: Have two models, and see which one predicts the next decades better.
Economists also attempt to test micro-economic principles through controlled, randomized experiments, similar to how psychology experiments are conducted.
A controlled experiment in climate science/geophysics/etc would involve building two earths (or stars, in the case of astronomy), subjecting one to a treatment and using the other as a control.
According to whom?
Wikipedia: Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
More importantly: who cares?
i.e. controlled experiments.
> More importantly: who cares?
Anyone who's interested in the truth.
Explanations can be tested through careful observation of uncontrolled environments.
Game. Set. Match.
Obviously not the real thing, but interesting to note.
Otherwise, a lot of care is taken to identify causal relationships in economics (e.g. thorugh instrumenting explanatory variables).