I remember some years back an academic dust-up caused by some guy insisting that economists should not be counted in the Big Club of Science Guys because economics wasn’t a science.
Seems to me he has a case. Science is based on principles like repeatable experiments, etc. How can one economist be proved right and another irrefutably wrong? Lysenko was wrong. Was Keynes right?
Sure, you can study economics. You can take courses in economics. You can even get a Ph.D. You can do the same with Womens Studies or Art History. Doesn’t make it science.
And if we aren’t really sure about economics as science, where do we get off practicing on our fellow persons. I mean, weren’t there academic economists who said the Laffer Curve made sense? It doesn’t, does it?
The only branch of economics that is a true science is the Austrian School, because it was derived as a deductive system, similar to the derivation of geometry.
It is and it isn’t.
There is a mathematical basis behind economic theorys. Some of them have proofs to show that they are true (if you do this then this will happen). Also economists can observe what happens in the world and see how changes affect the economy and businesses to create models which can predict how they will change in the future. Sounds like a science to me.
The only thing that is unscientific is to know what is best to do. You can work out what is possible to do and how best to do it but everyone has their own opinions on what is best for the masses (or the privilaged few if you’re one of them and a bit selfish).
Similar questions could be raised in orhter areas, such as, “Is social science science?” In my field, “Is actuarial science science?”
When researchers use the scientific method to the best of their ability in “non-scientific” fields, valuble insight can result. Of course, there are also those in the “baffle 'em with bullshit” who misuse mathematical models.
Of course it is. A “science” is a system of knowledge that attempts to explain the functioning of natural laws through observation and experimentation.
Economics is, in fact, a system of knowledge that attempts to explain the functioning of natural laws (a facet of human behaviour - economics is really a subset of psychology) using observation and experimentation. Real economists DO study the real world, ya know. And there is experimentation in economics.
To suggest that economics is not a science is exactly equivalent to suggesting that astronomy is not a science. After all, most astronomy’s just observation and guesswork, right? You can’t actually recreate a star in a lab. How do I know Hawking’s assumptions about black holes are correct? Can’t re-run them in experimentation.
Now, it should be duly noted that economics is a very recently developed form of science - like psychology, it really just came into its own in the 20th century. So developmentally it may be now where physics and chemistry were 300 years ago. That doesn’t make it any less a science.
Which raises ethical issues. What if neurosurgeons conducted experiments on the population the way Keynesians do?
Woah, Nellie! There’s a big difference between wild-ass guessing and the theories of science. Every economic “theory” I’ve seen, except that of the Classical Austrians, fails by the scientific method.
Astronomers make predictions from mathematical models that are based on what they observe. As Mises, Hayek, and others have proved, Keynesians make predictions from mathematical models that are based on what they can’t observe.
Of course, first you must define science. By some definitions, medicine is not a science. Sorry, I can’t remember why; maybe this point is bogus.
At best, economics is a non-experimental system science. Similar to meteorology or astronomy. But with worse data.
(There is such a thing as experimental economics, but it is a small part of the discipline.)
Austrian economics is a fringe discipline. Hey, they may be totally correct. But they are not part of the mainstream of conservative, liberal or centrist economists.
The Laffer curve was described as a truism in theoretical terms. Laffer provided no evidence that it applied to the US economy in the 1970s or at any time. Few academicians took it seriously. It received lots of media play because of Laffer’s lunch and dinner meetings with Robert Bartley, the op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal. Bartley also was a big fan of the gold standard, but that idea had less traction as it didn’t involve tax cuts.
I prefer to call economics a discipline.
I’ll leave Keynesianism vs. Monetarism for another thread. I should say, though, that most economics is not done in the style of Keynes (or Hayek or Mises for that matter) anymore. The discipline has evolved in a more mathematical and statistical direction.
Okay, let’s say Keynes didn’t. (He did, sort of, but that’s neither here nor there.) So? Keynes isn’t the human embodiment of economics, though some seem to think he is.
Is physics any less a science because Isaac Newton chose to spend much of his time on alchemy and mysticism? There are lots of imbecile people who call themselves “Scientists” who claim to be students of “Creation science” and who take scientific truth from an old JEwish holy text rather than experimentation and observation - does that mean that geology and biology are not sciences, or does it just mean they’re dolts?
I don’t understand why - I didn’t even say what kind of experiments I was thinking of (never heard of game theory?) - but okay, let’s say it does. So what? What does that have to do with the OP? Don’t all scientific fields have to deal with ethical issues? This seems like a non sequitur.
Yes, there is. Now what makes you think that economics is based on “wild-assed guessing”? I would suggest that a program of “wild-assed guessing” would get you laughed out of the economics department of any school. I am certainly not familiar with any professors of economics who would tolerate wild-ass guessing as a research method.
Is that so? How? Could you explain what you mean by this in terms of the following economic theories?
Law of Comparitive Advantage
Indifference curves
Smith’s theories of the impact of enclosure in Great Britain
You seem to be attacking Keynesian theory, which means you’re really not addressing the OP. If Keynes was wrong, fine. Doesn’t that just mean he’s a bad scientist? It doesn’t speak to whether or not economics is a science.
Worse yet, what if they did it the way that libertarians do!?!
Oh dear…This is what makes the rational objectivist school of libertarianism so annoying (and, yes, I know the adherents of each of these don’t like to be lumped together, but neither do the Trotski-ists and the Leninists…I use “libertarian” here in a broad sense). Not only are they crazy, but they think they have gone ahead and derived their ideas deductively from first principles. A co-worker at work has a good saying about these types of people: “They are almost as smart as they think they are.” Unfortunately, being very intelligent, but a little less intelligent than you actually think you are can be a lot more dangerous than being just plain stupid!
[flowbark’s point that science is really primarily inductive…it is only mathematics that is deductive…is another good point. If the Austrian school has succeeded in deriving their economics theories deductively then they have gone beyond anything that has been done in, say, the hard sciences of physics and chemistry! Does that sound like it might be a bit fishy to you?!? Well it should!]
I don’t now if I have a hard-and-fast answer to the question of whether econ is a science or not. I would tend to finesse the question by saying it is a “social science”. Admittedly, that just begs the question, “Well, are social sciences science?” I think that is largely a matter of definition. I think they are fields of inquiry that lend themselves in some ways to techniques we associate with the scientific method, but not to as rigorous a degree as the hard sciences. And, to be fair to them, I think that the task in these fields is a lot harder than it is in, say, physics. I always had a bit of fondness for the quote that “physics is knowing everything about nothing and philosophy is knowing nothing about everything.” It is a bit overstated, but I think it helps to keep both physicists and philosophers humble.
First, let me note for the record that anyone relying on Lib’s bizarre renditions of economic theory, such as he seems to have squared it with objectivist religion, should get their head examined.
Actual debate in economics has, as others have noted, moved beyond both the old classical and Keynesian schools. Indeed the neo-Keynesians and the Neo-classical schools agree on much more than they disagree. (And tend to refrain from the quasi-ad hominems Lib has indulged in re Keynes here). I would hazard the opinion based on my reading, albeit somewhat limited, that the cross-fertilization has been quite productive and both vague and amorphous schools largely give props to the other side.
It might be useful, in terms of replying to the OP to first define what one intends by the word science.
Further, in connection with the observation in re the neo-Keynesian and neo-Classical schools, it might be helpful also to differentiate between descriptive economics and prescriptive economics. The former, as the term suggests, attempts to describe what is and how it works. I think it is same to say that the two major strains of thought mentioned largely agree on the fundamentals (leaving aside one person’s wild-ass hand-waving about experiments and whatnot). On the later, attempting to assert what should be, well there we find departures. Of course the division is partly artificial, but I think it describes a somewhat real difference in orientation.
I would hazard the opinion that descriptive economics is more “scientific” in an ordinary sense of the word than prescriptive as here the role of one’s conception of “what ought to be” becomes rather larger.
So, there you have it. I guess the general answer has been depending on how one defines science…
Perhaps a discussion of the new behaviouralist studies might be more fun?
Good post Collounsbury. It is particularly important to recognise the distinction between positive economics and normative economics.
To which jshore replied
Let’s be clear about what economists regard as an experiment: get a bunch of people in a lab under controlled conditions and see what they do. There is a fair bit of this sort of work and yes, work is replicated.
Now for macroeconomic policy there can be no experiments (although you might get some guide from finance market experiments) and we must rely on statistical techniques and theory. That’s not very satisfactory but that doesn’t make it unscientific. It means we’re having a hard time. Note that many sciences (palaeontology for one) face experimental limitations and have to rely on other techniques for much of their work. Now a lot of people vision of what science is is of someone in a white coat doing some decisive experiment where something in a test tube turns blue. Economics is not like this, but most of the time no science is.
Quick comment about Keynes for Libertarian: My guess is that you see Keynes as standing for greater government intervention in the economy and that you don’t want to like him or recognise him as a thinker because you want rather less in the way of intervention.
However, bear in mind that there is no general agreemnt about what The General Theory means, nor what it means to be a Keynesian. For example as a professional economist I think of Milton Friedman’s macroeconomics as itself having a Keynesian flavour. Not because he reaches a particular conclusion about government spending but because in his story the classical dichotomy does not hold in the short run; the presence and degree of nominal rigidities is important in determining the economy’s adjustment to shocks (including monetary and fiscal policy changes); and his story can be told in the Hicksian IS/LM framework which Hicks invented to try and explain what Keynes was on about.
And taking Friedman’s or Hayek’s or von Mises’ view on Keynes without a pinch of salt is very naive.
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