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Comment by tenacious_tuna | Hacker News Reader

without getting too deep into "field purity" [0], it's certainly a field of study insofar as game theory, psychology, anthropology, etc. are fields of study. It's possible to make certain models of behavior or outcome potentials, but running experiments is significantly more difficult than e.g. physics or biology.

So it's science inasmuch as anything with n=1 repeatability can be science

[0]: https://xkcd.com/435/

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Weirdly, it's much easier to run empirical experiments in psychology (my field), but economics for whatever reason is MUCH more rigorous and empirical than psychology in my experience.

It may have to do with the overall complexity being easier to effectively model. Psychology has such big error terms that you either give up or get comfortable with a lot of hand-waving and dogma. A huge proportion of psychologists are just activists and have no real interest in being scientists (beyond the prestige).

Economics can certainly test theorems with n>1. "Supply and demand", that is, "The ratio of supply over demand changes inversely with price", has been verified in trades done by crows and monkeys, and uncountably many times in humans.

Of course, more specific economic hypotheses (such as "Universal Basic Income produces inflationary pressure") can be harder to separate from hidden variables and noise.

Astrophysics cannot make experiments either, but it's a (most fascinating) science indeed.

What are you talking about? Astrophysicists do all kinds of experiments. The Nobel was just awarded to a guy that designed an Astrophysics experiment.

They are meaning experiments in the sense of adjusting the state of the thing being experimented upon. Astrophysics and economics experiments are both limited to adjusting the way we collect the data, not the subject itself (you can’t practically poke a star or an economy with a stick). Presumably the reason they’re using this line in the sand is that it is the key technique to separate correlation from causation, which is a limitation that tends to be more of a problem in economics than astrophysics (but certainly does frustrate in both fields).

The real problem of course is that economics is like astrophysics with only 1 star (or maybe 100 stars that bump into each other constantly… the analogy is imperfect)

Thank you.

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