Economics in general can be defined as a set of narratives hunting for evidence, which makes it fundamentally NOT a science “hard or soft” since the pursuit of truth is compromised at the very beginning of conducting any would-be science.
If you go hunting for evidence by forcing abstract definitions and pre-constructed mental structures onto reality and repeating the process until you get promising results, even if you somehow come out with the right answer you aren’t doing science.
A genuine science would welcome these alternative perspectives and subject them to rigorous testing against orthodox theories. The fact that economics maintains competing schools that fundamentally disagree on basic questions—and resolves this through institutional power rather than evidence—reveals that it functions more like competing ideologies than scientific theories.
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The 2008 financial crisis illustrates this problem perfectly. The crisis did not occur because people suddenly became irrational or because of external shocks. It emerged from systematic interactions of rational actors operating within particular rules and institutions—exactly the kind of systemic phenomenon that mainstream economics struggles to understand because of its reductionist focus on individuals.
Economics is just a branch of science concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth. It’s not a problem looking for a solution, it’s an attempt at understanding an extremely complex system.
It sounds like you have a problem with economic theories/systems and people being unwilling to acknowledge the flaws in them, which is a valid problem to have.
But name a branch of science that hasn’t pushed bad theories and resisted evidence to the contrary.
Economics isn’t just a belief system, but it’s also not a hard science. It’s basically an offshoot of sociology.
Have you read any of Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s work? His writing is what comes to mind when people defend economics.
Economics in general can be defined as a set of narratives hunting for evidence, which makes it fundamentally NOT a science “hard or soft” since the pursuit of truth is compromised at the very beginning of conducting any would-be science.
If you go hunting for evidence by forcing abstract definitions and pre-constructed mental structures onto reality and repeating the process until you get promising results, even if you somehow come out with the right answer you aren’t doing science.
…
https://chevan.info/economics-is-not-a-science/
Economics is just a branch of science concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth. It’s not a problem looking for a solution, it’s an attempt at understanding an extremely complex system.
It sounds like you have a problem with economic theories/systems and people being unwilling to acknowledge the flaws in them, which is a valid problem to have.
But name a branch of science that hasn’t pushed bad theories and resisted evidence to the contrary.
The waters are getting muddy once we start discussing hard & soft sciences, beliefsystems and politics.
But economics only works because of its underlying premises . These premises can be eroded, like: trust, open and transparent market, and trade, iirc.
And the changes to the underlying premises as well as their impacts are part of the study of economics.