Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them."

Excerpt from Hidden Order, a book which explains economic concepts to non-economists.

Non-falsifiable explanation aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

While it's a nice quote above, I suspect many economists would disagree with that reduction of their field to being only backwards looking.

Nonsense. Most sciences aren't about making predictions. Another example is linguistics. Linguists have reconstructed languages long extinct and figured out how they evolved into modern languages. Yet, they can't predict how these languages will evolve in the future. Does this mean these explanations useless? No. Why should they be useless? They may not be of interest to you, but that doesn't mean they're useless.

There are heterodox schools, such as the Austrian school, that reject the scientific method, and these are definitely not scientific.

Really you need more modest goals, for example to at least try to approach the subject objectively rather than via sentimental moralizing. Even that is a massive effort. Imagine a physicist decrying how "wrong" it is for gravity to be weaker than the other forces. You would laugh at such a person and immediately classify them as not a real physicist. So you can use that as a filter to exclude much of heterodox economics and economists as a start. That's the battle being waged -- objectivity -- not falsifiability.

So far, this rule of thumb has not let me down.

FYI, you may want to read Feynman's lecture on Cargo Cult Science -- that is avoiding the trappings of science while not actually having the rigour and intellectual honesty of true science. A good link is here: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

I enjoy economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, etc, but they are most definately not science.

And this is your whole argument?

Isn't physics a "natural science" and therefore not science according your rule of thumb.

This discussion is stupid. If you want to argue that social sciences are not science, all you have to do is show that social sciences don't follow the scientific methodology. If you can't show that, you should shut up and stop wasting everybody's time.

But in the physical sciences you have well-formed mathematical models that make very specific and precise predictions and can be tested to a high degree of accuracy. That specificity allows you to set threshholds like 5 sigma for acceptance of a result as being verified.

"Did we find copper" is a bit different, and thus there is a fuzziness in history that you don't have in physics or chemistry, which is why we don't view history as being a science even though it benefits from use of the scientific method. Everything -- cooking, dating, gardening -- can make use of the scientific method, but at issue here is the trust that the public places in accepted findings of science and such trust is not justified in the fuzzier fields. People need to add big error bars in their heads when listening to results from social sciences and much smaller error bars when listening to results from physics.

How are you going to measure the outcomes and for how long will you measure them?

The problem with economics is how politicised this field is and how the best theory ends up being what's best for governments and politicians. Is mainstream economics what's more convenient for the 1% or what's best for the world?

We will never know what the economy would be if we weren't so Keysian. Maybe we wouldn't have a crisis every 10 years.