Is economics a science?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The principle of Supply and Demand is one that has so much historical empirical evidence that it might as well be called a physical law...but we can't call it that because the principle relies on human cognition, culture, and other non-deterministic influences. Trade theory also has an extremely strong empirical evidence. A lot of microeconomics is also very emprical, and even has a lot of experimental control mechanisms for which macroeconomics does not. Still, we can accept these ideas as true beyond any reasonable doubt. However, we have an extremely long way to go before the rest of the field catches up to the same standards.
Regardless, I take exception to the claim that they "often don't predict the real markets all that well". They can predict real markets very well in most scenarios. Most theoretical-basis predictions of price ceilings and floors (such as rent control or minimum wages) are perfectly sound, but there is plenty of ambiguity in the results that critics seem to misinterpret as proof of the failure of Supply and Demand to predict outcomes.
Price ceilings tend to result in shortages, but occasionally result in no effect at all. But that isn't enough evidence to say that Supply and Demand doesn't apply to this scenario. In order to disprove the applicability of Supply and Demand, you would have to show that a price ceiling increased the quantity supplied. Such scenarios are as rare as black swans.
Amazing that we are in the longest recession in years, and back in 2006 most economists were saying the only way is up.
This argues that science is sort of an ice cream store with dozens of flavors. But in the science store, there's just one flavor. Its ingredients are evidence and falsifiability. Either you can test an idea against reality unambiguously, and potentially falsify it, or you cannot. Fields that cannot produce unambiguous falsifications, and that won't discard failed theories, are not sciences. On that basis, economics is not a science.
Proving a theory true is not in science's purview -- nothing is every proven true once and for all, and all ideas are perpetually open to falsification in the face of new evidence. But the ability to prove a theory false is a must. No falsifiability, no science.
"No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion." -- David Hume
Also, do you have to link that ruddy xkcd comic on every comment? I think most people saw it the first 2 times you posted it.
Or better, if you want to keep strict, to things that can have an experiment "perfectly reproduced" infinite times, then you have physics and chemistry for that.
Biology? No. A simple example, the LD for a substance. At LD50 you have 50% of samples dying. Here you have a substance with a very strong effect (death), at a high dose (because it kills 50%) and still, the chance of it effecting the sample is 50% (ok, 50% by design of experiment, and you'll have an spectrum of reactions)?
An electron suffers a force inside an electrical field, 100% (exactly) of the time. Some things have some probabilities, like nuclear decay, where it decays to substance 1 A1% of the time and to substance 2 A2% of the time, but that's it, no in-betweens.
True about Scotsmen, false about science. Science is easy to define, therefore easy to detect.
Either a field has testable, falsifiable ideas -- ideas that can be compared to reality in practical tests, indeed are compared to reality, and are promptly discarded if they fail the test -- or they do not. End of story, fini, full stop.
> Biology? No.
Biology, yes. Either DNA is the source of heredity or it isn't. It's testable and falsifiable. Either natural selection produces new species or it doesn't. Again, testable and falsifiable. Biology can make and test empirical claims, and it does, and it discards those ideas that fail the test. That's science.
Look at prions. At first no one knew what was going on, so they did some research. They took body fluid from one victim and passed it through a filter that would have stopped a virus, but the prions got through. This forced the explanation that something smaller than a virus was reproducing and causing fatal illnesses. This led to a much better assessment of what prions are. A falsifiable test was performed, the test succeeded, prions are real. Mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and a handful of other diseases would have remained unexplained, except for the science.
> An electron suffers a force inside an electrical field, 100% (exactly) of the time.
It's easy to describe physics as a science, for the reason that it is very much a science. What's hard is comparing physics to other endeavors that might or might not be sciences. But there's no reason to use physics as a science yardstick -- all one needs to do is ask, "what theories have you tested, falsified, and discarded?"
As always, it's more complicated than that. But you can definitely test (and confirm) for DNA being a part of it.
But that's one part of biology, confined to planet Earth, and we're not sure it's the whole story.
Yes, it is proven, according to science rules that, (for all biological entities known) DNA (and RNA) conveys hereditary information.
But biological proofs are weaker than physics proofs. "Oh, you proved humans have this thing called blood cells and they're round?" Until you find people with congenital Anemia, and look, their blood cells are not round, because this makes them immune to Malaria. So it's not possible to generalize as much.
In Physics I am confident that the electrons (and chemical elements) in my computer are 100% indistinguishable from the ones in the Sun (albeit in different quantities and temperature of course)
And speaking about physics, light was a wave and this had been tested and verified multiple times. Until it wasn't.
> As always, it's more complicated than that.
No, it isn't. All one need do is demonstrate that DNA is not the source of heredity, i.e. falsify the claim. That's how science works. Epigenetics doesn't disprove the role of DNA, it augments it, in the same way that conduction and convection stand alongside radiation as mechanisms for the transport of heat energy.
> But biological proofs are weaker than physics proofs.
Not the scientific ones.
> And speaking about physics, light was a wave and this had been tested and verified multiple times. Until it wasn't.
That's misleading. There was a debate about whether light was a wave or a particle -- evidence supported both views. Eventually a new theory combined and fully validated all the prior observations by showing that light is both a wave and a particle. That theory is the best-supported and most powerful theory devised to date, and is the crowning achievement of 20th century physics. And it will eventually be replaced by an even better theory, one that explains more, with fewer preconceptions and arbitrary axioms.
That is science at its best, science driven by evidence, evidence that shapes theories, theories that must survive testing or be discarded.
Oh, I'm not saying DNA isn't the source of heredity. I'm saying that there are other smaller factors. (you can google them). Heredity in the strict sense, yes, it's DNA, in the broader sense, well, you can have two different fenotypes with the same genotype.
> There was a debate about whether light was a wave or a particle -- evidence supported both views.
Not before the 20th century, diffraction of light (amongst others) firmly put it as a wave. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#Wave_theory
And the wave theory of light is still widely used (when it's applicable of course).
> Not before the 20th century,
Yes before the 20th century. I refer you to the debate between Newton and Huygens as well as Hooke, his contemporaries with respect to these ideas.
http://www.studyphysics.ca/newnotes/20/unit04_light/chp1719_...
Such debates persisted from then until the shaping of quantum theory.
Every living being have different physiology, so there are differences in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics; all of that is explainable at molecular level. LD50 is just statistical indicator, you can even explain why something is lethal at high dose, why is cure at medium dose and why dont play any role on low dose.
Your argument is sophomoric. Read Popper, Jaynes, any number of other sources.
If your argument was true, science would be entirely true, uncontroversial, complete, and done. Clearly it is not. I wonder what is lacking here: the body of science, or your conception of scientific epistemology.
Of course not.
But because every electron is (according to our models) identical, we can get closer to eliminating the errors in the specific measurement context (with the exception of uncertainty principle and effects related to it, of course)
> If your argument was true, science would be entirely true, uncontroversial, complete, and done
I am not claiming that. And getting to the "end of science" of course may never happen.
Fields that can and do test their theories against reality in practical, empirical tests, that discard falsified theories, and that have a corpus of supporting evidence that forces all similarly equipped observers to the same conclusion, are sciences. The rest are pseudosciences whose status is clearly shown by innumerable articles whose titles end in a question mark.
No, they aren't. A mathematical proof is by definition unfalsifiable. If an error is found in a proof (as with Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem), that it isn't a proof ... yet. And mathematical proofs aren't empirical, another requirement for science.
Scientific theories are falsifiable in perpetuity because the possibility always exists for new empirical evidence to show up that falsifies an existing theory. This possibility doesn't exist for mathematical proofs.
Having a corpus of poor quality articles does not exclude you from being a science. Having dissenting groups, and areas where existing evidence permits more than one conclusion, does not exclude you from being a science. Quite the opposite: if there was no dissent, there would be no science.
That's true, but if all that exist are poor-quality articles, then it's not science -- there must be a corpus of testable, falsifiable theories beyond the chaff. This is why psychology isn't a science -- there are lots of poor-quality articles, and there's nothing else.
> if there was no dissent, there would be no science.
Nonsense. A scientific dissent must be accompanied by evidence, as does the thing being dissented against. Dissent per se means nothing in and of itself.
In order to understand economics in my view, you have to know how politics work. Politicians and nations or people in power at any given time can turn a debt to 0 or to a war. Of course in a democracy it's more complicated, but generally that's the main idea. The their puppets try to justify the move.
It is what is happening in Greece, in the USA, in Italy and in other parts of world.
Rationality and math has little to do with economics. So since economists never predict anything really (when they do they get a Nobel), I hardly see this as a science.
As for the argument that physics or biology is not a science, I can know this: the same experiment can done time and again giving the same result. Try it in real-life economics...
However you are completely wrong about sovereign debt. It is a minor issue, and defaults almost never result in wars. Argentina defaulted or restructured its debt 4 times since 1980.
Like Schiller, I believe that it is possible to test and validate theories, but at the same time we cannot have the same certainty as in physics, and the "irreducibly human element" will also prevent the same deep mathematical theories that we see in physics, ever being developed for economics.
Economist call their discipline "social science" basically because they suffer from "science envy". They want to believe that there are simple things like "water molecule is the bonding of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen". But in economy they are not, as economy is about the most flexible thing on Earth, humans and the relationship between them.
Economy is about dogma, there are Keynesians dogma followers(that look like never read a book of Keynes), Austrian dogma followers, and so on. Nothing to do with science but with power grabbing. Today all institutions are dominated by keynesians ands as everybody can see they are making the world a worse place.
The only reason we can't transform social sciences into hard sciences is because it would be horrifically cruel and unethical to exert rigid, inflexible rules on thinking, breathing, feeling human beings.
You can't turn human beings into raw predictable numbers without killing them, or throwing them in jail (however intangible such a prison might be, loss of choice and free will is enslavement).
If you have the time watch Professor Steve Keens one of the economists who predicted the 2008 subprime bubble criticize main stream economics.
Especially the Federal reserve system which is privately owned by the biggest banks. Read on Edward Griffins google the creature from Jekyll island. In that information you will find that the FED was created by a among others senator Aldrich who's daughter was married to one of the banks who created the FED.
Thus private banks create debt out of thin air more now so than ever they are backed up by central banks. In the European central bank, the head of the bank comes from Goldman Sachs. There is a documentary called 97% owned which states 97% of all money in circulation are now debt just 3% is cash.
Ever wonder how the rich gets richer?
Economical decisions are so much entangled and tainted with politics, that's a big reason why it's not really scientific. The theory is sound, but practice is awful for many reasons, mostly political and because of the human factor.
Capitalism is a decent and somewhat balanced practice of economics, but the fact that it's not a hard science shows that there is a disconnect between theory and practice.
Also, imagine a world where macroeconomic models get thrown out, or at least modified, when their predictions fail. Wouldn't that be neat?
The ideologists wanting to demote economics never seem to want to also throw geology out of the university.
(In the future, some gigantic geo engineering might make geology experimental, the same goes for "perfect" computer models of society and economic experiments. Don't hold your breath, unless we argue inside such a model now; wonder what the hypothesis is? :-) )
Do you know of any macroeconomical (because, really, that's all about macro) theory that was discarded since Keynes become mainstream?
(And of course you can randomly test some things in historical sciences too. E.g. finding historical trading patterns by looking at materials used for artefacts, diet by looking at enamel of skeletons, etc etc. Other things won't find any possible test solution, ever.)
Many (most?) economists think that that will have disastrous consequences for the US economy. Iff economy is a science, then their view should be taken into account because it is based on solid scientifically-backed evidence. Exactly like how you would take the view of climate scientists very seriously if you knew climate science was a real science.
But if economy is not a science, that means there is no evidence either or. Then you have no one else results to rely on and have to use your own common sense to analyze questions like the above one.
The miniscule subset of all things in the universe that we do know scientifically doesn't mean that the things outside that subset don't provide any value.
If an economic theory is useful even if it doesn't have a proof like in hard sciences it provides value nevertheless.
There are scientifically proven things that are undisputable but which, on the other hand, aren't much of a value either now but maybe of great value later, at some point in the future. But merely having scientific evidence is not an implication of value.
If something seems to work, it seems to work. If that something also gets scientifically verified at some point it might turn out to have additional value, too. But it still works if it happened to worked before that.
Of all the information verified in hard sciences only a part is practically valuable in running societies, governments, states, and efforts involving humans. The minimum wage of fast food workers is a problem that has no scientific answer and which is also probably quite hard to approach scientifically in the first place. I suppose that the majority of question in a human society are like that.
An inflated appreciation towards scientifically verified information tends to overlook everything else that isn't scientifically verified. Yet all those things lacking scientific verification are things among which new theories are discovered and some of those do eventually become proven and verified.
Yet ultimately, there are no truths, just opinions. Some opinions are individual opinions and may not be shared by many. Some opinions are reasonably based on evidence from various scientific experiments and some of that evidence is so solid that it would be hard to convince most of individuals in our culture otherwise. The physical theories involving air travel are accepted and tested by millions of people every day: they're effectively betting their lives against the theories explaining flight being correct. So the opinions are shared by many if not most people and they practically become something we consider a truth. Yet what happens is not that it becomes more true or a more absolute truth: what happens is that you convince more people —— and often for a good reason, but objectively that's what can be seen happening. In the end, all we have is our mind and the way we make it up.
To answer your question: some subdisciplines of psychology are (e.g. biological psychology), and some are not (e.g. psychoanalysis). From what I've seen, all world-class universities emphasize the former; the latter is only taught in passing in psych 101 as history.
I've yet to see anybody seriously discuss psychoanalysis nowadays outside of... well, to be honest, women's studies. Of course, that field never claimed to be a science. Oh, Žižek does too.