I want to second Arnold Kling’s recommendation of this article on the social sciences by artificial intelligence entrepeneur Jim Manzi. A snippet:
It is tempting to argue that we are at the beginning of an experimental revolution in social science that will ultimately lead to unimaginable discoveries. But we should be skeptical of that argument. The experimental revolution is like a huge wave that has lost power as it has moved through topics of increasing complexity. Physics was entirely transformed. Therapeutic biology had higher causal density, but it could often rely on the assumption of uniform biological response to generalize findings reliably from randomized trials. The even higher causal densities in social sciences make generalization from even properly randomized experiments hazardous. It would likely require the reduction of social science to biology to accomplish a true revolution in our understanding of human society—and that remains, as yet, beyond the grasp of science.
I think that’s true and that for the foreseeable future solid, scientific, predictive knowledge of human societies and behavior will prove elusive. This might be an appropriate time to mention John Kenneth Galbraith’s wisecrack that there were two kinds of economists: those who don’t know and those who don’t know that they don’t know.
