Unlike the natural sciences, critics say, economics suffers from unrealistic assumptions, messy data, confounding variables, failed predictions, intractable disagreements, misguided policies, subjective distortions, and political biases. Natural sciences are different, they tell me. Like, for example, virology. Scientists working on COVID have provided nothing but airtight assumptions, pristine data, crystal-clear chains of causality, dead-on-accurate predictions, harmonious agreement, relentlessly successful policies, serenely dispassionate reasoning, and near-saintly absence of politics from their pronouncements. (For those nodding in agreement, please refer to Poe’s Law.)
Economics is as much a science as virology or physics. Same methods, same purposes. Arguing otherwise underestimates economics and overestimates natural science.
[I’m not sure I agree, but it’s a great read. In theory, the ‘hard’ sciences are more what the term means, while economics belongs to the social sciences. The reality that the intellectual rigor of the hard sciences is so poor these days that they are at or below the standard of economics does not make them equal, I’d argue; it just means we’ve been seeing bad performance and a lack of integrity in the ‘hard’ sciences. But economics is certainly a worthy and necessary social science and discipline, with its own dignity and worth. – Ed]
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