Re:Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)
by brmgb on Sunday March 31, 2019 @07:33PM
(#19539190)
> It seems kind of short-sighted to me to say that the people who are trying to build those aren't doing "real science." I don't understand the theory there... that they haven't figured it all out yet, so it's not worth doing?
It's not about heuristics. It's about experimental validation. Both physicists and chemists take great pain in actually rigorously confronting their theories to reality. Biologists try. Most economists don't.
It doesn't mean there is no value in economic models and theories. It does however mean it's not a science.
It's possible to produce useful predictions with small errors when you define very simple systems, which is what the foundational scientific topics have done. Of course it took centuries of hard work to do even that.
Physicists and chemists and biologists and economists all study the same thing. It's just that most chemists use heuristics to avoid dealing with the full physical complexity, and most biologists use heuristics to avoid dealing with the full chemical complexity.
Unfortunately, the jump in complexity from biology to the behavior of a population of humans is still too complex; we don't have great heuristics for that yet.
It seems kind of short-sighted to me to say that the people who are trying to build those aren't doing "real science." I don't understand the theory there... that they haven't figured it all out yet, so it's not worth doing?