Re:Getting a Job in a Top Tier Quant Hedge Fund
by dragonwriter on Thursday September 12, 2013 @04:23PM
(#6376697)
> If a theory makes coherent, testable predictions, and if the predictions can be tested empirically, then there's a basis for falsification. Economics doesn't have this property.
The subject matter of economics certainly involves the kind of observable quantifiable results that admit of falsifiable hypotheses.
Its true that many of the interesting hypotheses offered in the field are falsfiable in principle but faced with significant pragmatic difficulties in conducting unambiguous tests which leads to the practical tests frequently providing ambiguous results, and that many of the practical-and-unambiguous falsification tests are unsatisfying (in that, while they could unambiguously falsify the hypotheses they are offered as tests for, they aren't differential tests wherein the result that fails to falsify one interesting hypothesis necessary does falsify a competing interesting hypothesis.)
This doesn't make economics "not a science". It makes it a difficult science.
(The fact that the questions in the domain are often important to public policy and other decisions in which lots of people with lots of resources have vested interest also results in a lot of things in the field being oversold to decision-makers, but that's equally true in similarly salient physical science fields that don't face the same kinds of testing difficulties, and is irrelevant to whether the field is a scientific one.)
The subject matter of economics certainly involves the kind of observable quantifiable results that admit of falsifiable hypotheses.
Its true that many of the interesting hypotheses offered in the field are falsfiable in principle but faced with significant pragmatic difficulties in conducting unambiguous tests which leads to the practical tests frequently providing ambiguous results, and that many of the practical-and-unambiguous falsification tests are unsatisfying (in that, while they could unambiguously falsify the hypotheses they are offered as tests for, they aren't differential tests wherein the result that fails to falsify one interesting hypothesis necessary does falsify a competing interesting hypothesis.)
This doesn't make economics "not a science". It makes it a difficult science.
(The fact that the questions in the domain are often important to public policy and other decisions in which lots of people with lots of resources have vested interest also results in a lot of things in the field being oversold to decision-makers, but that's equally true in similarly salient physical science fields that don't face the same kinds of testing difficulties, and is irrelevant to whether the field is a scientific one.)