I agree that this doesn't match the definition of a scientific experiment, in that there is no control group within the bloc to which the higher interest levels were not applied. Nonetheless, it seems to be a textbook example of an economy proving to be manipulable in exactly the way that economic theory suggests it will be.
Its too easy with economics to look backwards and retroactively attribute what happened to a cause that would have made sense. It seems likely that Covid and the Russian war were causes of inflation, but we don't really know even that. For one thing, during the pandemic in the EU most stores and restaurants were closed. One could look at the economic relief (money printing) and expect inflation, but one could also look at the massive drop in spending and expect deflation instead. Had we seen deflation I fully expect today's economic analysis would be that lockdowns and business closures were clearly going to lead to deflation.
In that case, is geology a science?
I too am sceptical about economics (mostly macro, the micro stuff is fine) but there are lots of places where you can't run experiments and some of them are science.
Even in physics, Einstein's theories had to be supported by things like astronomical observations.
We will never know if quantum state exists or if probability clouds collapse upon observation because by that very principle we will never know the state prior to observing it.
Calling it "wholely unscientific" makes you seem like a crank.
How would you propose we could test quantum state and collapse to validate that the concept is actually correct?
Like (I grumble about this approach a lot) observational studies at a population level are certainly science, even though there's no experiments. Granted, in medicine at least they end up feeding into RCTs and controlled studies which is good, but in a lot of cases (child development is a big one) lots of hypotheses can't ethically be tested using experimental designs.
We can't get sets of identical twins and raise one in a rich home and another in a poor home, holding everything else constant. Does this mean twin studies aren't science?
I actually kinda agree that a lot of economics is very poor science (far too much maths on far too little data) but that's reflective of the difficulty of collecting such data rather than an indictment of the approach.
Economics is a science of human behaviour, which is not exact. Economic models are like weather models. They cannot be exact because what they are modelling (weather, human behaviour) is incredibly complicated with millions of parameters.
Science is about observing something, forming a hypothesis about why it is that way, and then testing the hypothesis to determine whether it is correct.
Many Economics researchers do all of the above, so they are scientists.