Thursday, March 1, 2012

Economics Is Not A Science

This is the best statement on the fallacy of Economics as a science in relation to hard science, your kind of science.  Even masquerading as a Social Science it is nothing more than a priesthood invoking the tools of science for pseudo science black magic. 

It is long but I liked this:

Economics is a priesthood that truly believes it is not a priesthood but, rather, a community of scientists. How do they manage to maintain this delusion? The simple answer is because their incantations involve rather advanced mathematics and their rituals are steeped in statistical tests and projections.

Indeed, in aesthetic terms, the economists’ papers, models, presentations seem indistinguishable from those of physicists, bio-statisticians etc. The only difference is that, unlike the latter, economists generate nothing more than analytical propositions about economic variables which are, as Popper would have pointed out, profoundly non-falsifiable. And here is the rub. Once their non-falsifiable (and thus non-verifiable) propositions are expressed, the statistical tests that follow (usually referred to as econometrics) give economists a great excuse to imagine that their models have been tested. But tested they never are!

No comments: