Inflated Bond Ratings Helped Spur the Financial Crisis. They’re Back

Re:Inflated Bond Ratings Helped Spur the Financial Crisis. T... by mochomocha on Wednesday August 07, 2019 @10:42PM (#20641362)

For 90% of the cases that interest mainstream media, economics is not a science because proper experiments cannot be run. You cannot have clean counterfactuals and no "A/B testing" setup to validate hypothesis in most interesting cases of dramatic economic events (like a recession). Most theories end up being... theories, with weak validation based on dubious instrumental variables, if any are considered at all.

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Re:Inflated Bond Ratings Helped Spur the Financial Crisis. T... by bacon_waffle on Thursday August 08, 2019 @12:47AM (#20641927)

Being unable to run those sorts of experiments doesn't disqualify a field from being a Science - consider astrophysics.

I think the issue here is more that economics is describing human behaviour, and we don't fit well in to a mathematical formula.

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Re:Inflated Bond Ratings Helped Spur the Financial Crisis. T... by klodolph on Thursday August 08, 2019 @03:31AM (#20642541)

This is exactly correct. But the issue that “humans don’t fit well to a mathematical formula” is also true of everything that you don’t describe with quantum field theory. Even chemistry is full of this.

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Re:Inflated Bond Ratings Helped Spur the Financial Crisis. T... by philipps on Thursday August 08, 2019 @07:34AM (#20643522)

A key aspect of the scientific method is that claims can be demonstrated to be not true (it doesn’t matter if the demonstration is done in a lab or not).

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Re:Inflated Bond Ratings Helped Spur the Financial Crisis. T... by notfromhere on Thursday August 08, 2019 @09:49AM (#20644510)

You do understand that economists run experiments all the time, right?

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