Slashdot Mirror
Author Joris Luyendijk: Economics Is Not a Science (theguardian.com)
The Real Dr John writes: A Nobel prize in economics, awarded this year to Angus Deaton, implies that the human world operates much like the physical world: that it can be described and understood in neutral terms, and that it lends itself to modeling, like chemical reactions or the movement of the stars. It creates the impression that economists are not in the business of constructing inherently imperfect theories, but of discovering timeless truths. In 1994 economists Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, with their work on derivatives, seemed to have hit on a formula that yielded a safe but lucrative trading strategy. In 1997 they were awarded the Nobel prize in economics. A year later, Long-Term Capital Management lost $4.6bn (£3bn) in less than four months; a bailout was required to avert the threat to the global financial system.
Psychology is a science, although a fairly new one.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Nobel didn't originally accept economics as a science either, this economist won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which was originally provided by the Swedish bank in 1968 through a perpetual endowment to the Nobel Foundation.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I didn't get the connection between the Nobel prize and it having to be a science. Does that mean Literature and Peace are now sciences?
What most people are forgetting is that is a social science. The leave out the social part. It's going to be different than chemistry and physics. Mind you most of the stuff I hear from economists is either obvious or seems like they pulled it out of their ass.