Of course economics is a science. It’s a descriptive science like anthropology or sociology not a predictive science like physics. Gussying it up with numbers to support your political preferences doesn’t change that.
Of course economics is a science. It’s a descriptive science like anthropology or sociology not a predictive science like physics. Gussying it up with numbers to support your political preferences doesn’t change that.
Any field in which the fundamentals are still disputed after 80 years of data gathering is not a science. It’s vodou.
String theory is theoretical physics, and those working in the field are not mainstream scientists. Anybody who proposed building a bridge using it would be considered a quack.
In economics, a Nobel prize recipient has proposed that preparing for a space alien invasion is a proper method to get the economy moving.
Economic science is like climate science. There is something that is scientific, but the field has been taken over for political and monetary purposes. A conclusion is established first, and anything that refutes that conclusion is rejected.
One of the major problems with both is the number of variables that have not been identified, and that number is large and complex. Both also rely heavily on appeals to authority.
It might be useful to distinguish micro and macro economics. The supply and demand curves are predictive models. If I increase the price of a widget, the demand for that widget will decrease relative to elasticity. Generalizing these market predictions to an entire economy’s output becomes more difficult in terms of prediction. Does Schiller do much prediction? Seems like his index is more descriptive.
Macro in particular is not much of a science, even a descriptive one. Seems much more like religion.
Steve
@PD Shaw
There’s a serious lack of understanding about why micro-economics are not useful for macro-forecasting. Quite frankly the vast majority of economists do not understand the concept of emergent properties in a complex system. They think one can describe and predict the behavior of a swarm by watching a single bee and it just ain’t so. Many also live in an ahistorical void where nothing happened before five minutes ago (economic history as a subject has been virtually banished from academia), so they end up engaged in economic fallacies that were identified 80 years ago.
“Of course economics is a science. It’s a descriptive science like anthropology or sociology not a predictive science like physics.”
How do we differentiate those from, say, good historical writing? And is, then, history (that is, research+publication) also a descriptive science?
(I’m reminded of Luis Alvarez’s dig (yes) that paleontology a high-class form of stamp collecting.)
And BTW, while I’m not a defend-to-the-death Popperian, there is something to be said for falsifiability as the criterion for whether P is a scientific proposition. That said, it’s remarks like the following from Eugene Fama about the efficient market hypothesis that lead many, if not most, philosophers of science to question the claim that economics is a science of any stripe:
Think about that last for a moment.
He was following Ernest Rutherford’s famous wisecrack that all science was either physics or stamp collecting.
I should be gratified to find so many people who like me agree that economics is only barely related to science and much more closely related to fantasy, politics and religion.
But instead I’m disturbed because despite this acknowledgment of the limitations of economics it seems we all still have to pretend otherwise. We’re all still playing along with the notion that we know just exactly what should be done to solve any given economic problem. And we’re alternately lauding or savaging whatever politician happens to be standing closest to a given economic development. This is a very major component of our news and certainly of our politics. Governments rise or fall on their ability to affect an economy that economists can in no way predict.
Doesn’t this seem kind of stupid? To use my favorite analogy, the “science” of medicine in the 14th century, we’re essentially raging at politicians because they fail to control the vicious humors and miasmas and falling damps that we all know cause the plague. Why didn’t the king apply more leeches? Why doesn’t the privy council call for more cupping and bleeding? Shouldn’t the Lord Chamberlain put some mercury on that?
What would happen if we admitted we don’t really have any idea how to control the economy, and don’t really know the effects of policies on the economy until we see them play out? I mean, aside from putting CNBC out of work.
I think there’s a distinction to be made, Michael. I think that there are general principles in microeconomics that aren’t particularly controversial. For example, that except in certain very special cases the the quantity of a good demanded goes down as its price increases. However, we can’t predict exactly how much the quantity demanded will go down.
@michael, politicians take credit for the economy and cast blame on opponents for the economy, its the rules of the game they created. It wasn’t always so; James Monroe wasn’t blamed for the financial panic of 1819, but Van Buren was blamed for the Panic of 1837. The reason for the change was Andrew Jackson.
The micro doesn’t play much part in our obsession with economics. Aside maybe from the price of gas.
We have this image of a sort of super-corporation where presidents (or governors at the state level) are CEOs of a 15 trillion dollar business. This despite the fact that in the case of POTUS he has only very limited control of about a quarter of that 15 trillion. This idea, which is nonsensical on its face, dominates our political thinking. We demand to know why Mr. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama, while sitting in the back seat of the car and only barely able to reach the wheel, hasn’t managed to steer us to paradise.
In a couple of years we’ll be listening to promises from a new crop of wanna-bes, all assuring us that they can absolutely drive the economy despite having no map to steer by, and having damned little control in any event.
It’s a nutty way to run a country.
PD:
It’s like some guy standing on the beach taking credit when the tide rolls in, and then being stoned by onlookers when the tide rolls out. It’s a form of superstition.
@michael, more like trying to beach a ship. There are things outside of the pilots control, but the pilot doesn’t need to aim for the rocks. OTOH, the pilot shouldn’t take credit for ocean currents.
“The supply and demand curves are predictive models. If I increase the price of a widget, the demand for that widget will decrease relative to elasticity.”
I’ll make a prediction: If the price of Viagra doubled, the demand would not decrease.
@sam, I have an inbox full of propositions for cheap Viagra substitutes that say you’re wrong.
Sandra Fluke is also on line 2.
Viagra substitutes != Viagra. You’d have show the demand would decrease, wouldn’t you, not that substitutes are now available. It could be that folks who could not afford the real thing would go for the subs. That would not imply that the demand for real Viagra would decrease.
Nebbermine. I thought about that some more. I’m probably wrong. Although, I do think that anyone who responded to a email advert for a Viagra substitute would have no one to blame but himself if his Johnson came off in his hand…
@sam, I think the supply / demand curves are predictive science in the same way Newton’s Laws of Motion are. They predict a relationship, but don’t necessarily predict a specific outcome. I predict that a paper airplane when thrown will drop to the earth. I am not wrong because the plane has flown four feet and hasn’t dropped yet. Increasing the price of Viagra will gradually reduce the demand. Maybe you’re right, doubling the price might not be enough, but quadrupling might be. I’m skeptical though, why haven’t they already doubled the price?
“I’m skeptical though, why haven’t they already doubled the price?”
Well, Cialis and Levetra…maybe.
I was thinking after I read your post, that I had been thinking that nobody would be stupid enough to buy substitutes over the net or whatever. Then I thought to myself, “Are you kidding?”…
There are no laws of economics. No basic principles that exist external and above our daily interactions with each other. Any law of the field can be shown to break down given the proper (and not unusual) circumstances, just as the observation of supply and demand has completely failed in the last five years. How do the unemployed tens of millions signal their demand to firms when they can’t spend? How do firms determine what supply targets to hit without that signaling? The answer is, they can’t.
We can’t make economics a hard science but we can make it empirical, which it currently is not. A good start would be to pay more heed to models that have predictive power and dispense with those that have repeatedly failed.
@Michael Reynolds
You’re in good company as eighty years ago Keynes suggested economics was akin to theology rather than a science.
If anyone is still reading this thread, here’s an interesting article from Crooked Timber, Economics as a moral science, by Ingrid Robeyn, a philosopher and an economist. Here’s the nut:
I believe I can endorse that view. That was explicitly the position of the earliest writers on the subject. It’s largely vanished as more and more economists sought to put the patina of hard science on their moral judgments, not to mention so they could make moral judgments without moral education.
BTW, folks, if you haven’t read Greg Mankiw’s (justly crapped upon) paper, Defending the One Percent, which figures in the article previously cited, (google is your friend), do. A taste:
Did I mention he teaches at Harvard?
And then there’s this:
Seriously.
It’s pretty remarkable when you take into account that Harvard’s business model pretty much assumes that the opposite is true.