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.

Comments

Rocket analogy

[Noah Haders]

When a rocket blows up, it might be the engineers' fault, but you can't blame physics itself. It's not the fault of the field of economics that some bozo lost money and other bozos bailed them out.

Re:It should be obvious

[The Real Dr John]

If you broaden your definition of science to include all fields of human investigation, sure. But if you mean a science like biochemistry or physics, where you do controlled experiments, then no, it is not a hard science. Some people differentiate "hard" from "soft" sciences. OK, by that definition economics could be considered a soft science. But as the author of the article points out, there is much more political bias in "economics research" than in most sciences (where some bias is often unavoidable, but still can be manageable with proper controls). Really, economics is the study of trends in economic activity, but often strays into making pronouncements on political policy, which seems an awful lot more like politics than science.

Re:It should be obvious

[codeAlDente]

Astrology is a systematic, empirical study of the relationship between the alignment of planetary bodies and the observable traits and behavior of humans. But I wouldn't call astrology a science because its predictive power is limited.