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Comment by LukeWalsh | Hacker News Reader

You can't dismiss an entire subject matter as nonscientific just because many of the major players aren't advocating scientific methods of exploration.

At its root, science is about testing, observing, forming conclusions, and retesting. It just so happens that in the subject of economics you have an extremely large number of variables because of human behavior.

While concrete conclusions are difficult to come by, we should absolutely continue trying to understand things that we do not currently. Consider a future where the entire human brain could be mapped, and we entirely understood behavior. In this case studying economics and decision making would be much more realistic.

Just because our tools are extremely limited doesn't mean we should stop observing, and that very act is true science.

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I'm not sure as to what defines a field as "science" nor do I found it a very interesting question. What I do find interesting is the desire to apply the scientific method in economics.

The issue comes with the "testing" portion of the method. One is unable to setup economic experiments to perform these tests. Economists can make claims about historical events but they must a priori decide which data to ignore and which to include in their analysis. Things like this lead to two seemingly cogent, logical analysis of the great depression with one concluding that the Fed was the cause of the depression and another claiming it to be the savior. They both may have sound logic but their a priori assumptions were different.

In physics, you rarely have this scenario as experimentalists can setup artificial testing situation where they have control over how variables change. They can systematically change variables and observe the effects. A great deal of the work in physics goes into the explanation of the magnitude of effect variables have on results, largely to justify why certain effects can be ignored.

Ludwig von Mises wrote extensively about the problem attempting to apply the scientific method economics. He felt economics was fundamentally different from a field of study such as physics. I tend to agree with this. Side note, I have a Ph.D. in physics and am just an amateur economist. :)

I think, at the least, it's extremely disingenuous of contemporary economists to act as if this is not the case and that there aren't serious epistemological issues to reconcile in their field.

Your way of approaching science applies to Astrology as well. Do you consider daily horoscopes, online tarot readings, psychic readings, etc. science too?

ps. If concrete conclusions were not found the last 5,500 years, I don't believe we will find them in the next 5,500.

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