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Re:Economists made a model of the U.S. economy. Our debt cra... by disgruntledphd2 on Thursday July 17, 2025 @10:07AM (#44593617)
> when they can't really run any type of controlled studies

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.

Re:Economists made a model of the U.S. economy. Our debt cra... by seunosewa on Thursday July 17, 2025 @11:52AM (#44594695)
Evolutionary biology is another case where direct experiments don't work for the most part.

Even in physics, Einstein's theories had to be supported by things like astronomical observations.

Re:Economists made a model of the U.S. economy. Our debt cra... by _heimdall on Thursday July 17, 2025 @10:17PM (#44600529)
This touches on another area I view as wholely unscientific - quantum physics. The most fundamental hypothesis of the field is untestable by design.

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.

Re:Economists made a model of the U.S. economy. Our debt cra... by krapp on Thursday July 17, 2025 @10:28PM (#44600600)
We have technology that only works because quantum physics is a thing. Lasers, LEDs (particularly blue LEDs), GPS and MRIs and semiconductors are some examples. Computer chips are getting small enough that quantum tunneling is a real engineering concern. Quantum entanglement has been experimentally verified numerous times.

Calling it "wholely unscientific" makes you seem like a crank.

Re:Economists made a model of the U.S. economy. Our debt cra... by _heimdall on Friday July 18, 2025 @07:34AM (#44603548)
We have technologies that work, and we believe that quantum theory plays a part. We don't know that and we simply can't given that (a) its a theory and (b) it is untestable as I said earlier.

How would you propose we could test quantum state and collapse to validate that the concept is actually correct?

Re:Economists made a model of the U.S. economy. Our debt cra... by _heimdall on Thursday July 17, 2025 @10:15PM (#44600520)
How can it be science if you can't follow the scientific method? It can be a field of study for sure and it can be useful too. My argument isn't that only scientific study is useful, I'm arguing that economics isn't scientific.
Re:Economists made a model of the U.S. economy. Our debt cra... by disgruntledphd2 on Friday July 18, 2025 @05:58AM (#44602928)
Science doesn't require experimental designs, certainly they are incredibly helpful but they don't work for everything.

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.