1. Economists make predictions.
2. Geologists don't run experiments with n earths and randomized double-blind trials. Do you think they're not scientists either?
Although they can't travel back in time to do controlled experiments, computer simulations are pretty routine for the study of the deep time of the earth, for example, the neoproterozoic "snowball earth" simulations [1].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/W_Peltier/publication/1...
The large majority of articles in top journals feature both mathematical theory and statistical&causal inference on real data.
Econometrics is a major part of modern economics and attempts to do just that
HN comment? There are lots of books by respected authors written on the subject.
Just because the field exists and gets grants and gets to dictate policies and so on doesn't mean its scientific. Anything scientific in economics is just the math part, which are orthogonal to economic behavior and markets.
>* Economics has a lot more to offer than supply-demand curves, and it has been evolving greatly in many different directions and sub-fields like behavioural economics (especially living its golden age right now).*
The main things it has to offer is salaries for economists and favorable policy suggestions to politicians.
You're just proving my point here, this is outright dismissive of all forms of experimentation that goes on in many fields of economics. Do not blame the study for your lack of deeper understanding of it; it has more to offer than just salaried academics and macroeconomic policycrafting.
Mock-experimentation has been going on since forever in all kind of pseudo-sciences of the "soft" variety.
Even Freud did clinical "experiments".
I did an economics undergrad. One thing that really frustrated me about the whole subject was how they kept calling it a social “science” and yet there was no experiment or predictions. Everything was a retroactive explanation for something, e.g. the financial crash or the affect of a minimum wage. Where’s the predictions? Another thing that bothered me was that often it felt like they were introducing maths to make it all seem a bit more legit: like solving integrals for second-price bid auctions or describing utility functions and so on. But that was always just a cute model with no experimental evidence to back it up.
Basically, I think social sciences should stop calling itself a science unless they start making predictions. And they should make it more like statistics and psychology classes. Evidence is king.