Hacker News Reader

Economy is not that different from psychology, physics, or indeed any natural science. All try to predict how they would change depending on various factors and invent explanatory models that are never perfectly correct.

It’s just that some have had more apparent prediction success than others (non-coincidentally, it’s those that don’t directly involve humans as subjects), while some are liable to affect people’s lives in more direct and drastic ways (non-coincidentally, it’s those that do directly involve humans as subjects).

Economics sits at that intersection between the social sciences and the exact sciences: you can get some useful quantitative predictions out of it, but that is discounted by the fact that people are messy, and become even messier where money is concerned.

Economics is bulk effect Psychology.