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- CCoburn3, on 12/01/2008, -8/+1Anyone who believes that economics is a science is deluding himself.
Physics is a science. Throw a ball into the air on a windless day & the physicists will ALL predict the same trajectory for the ball and they will all be correct. Yes, there is disagreement on the edges of the discipline -- dark matter versus super strings & that sort of thing. But on core matters, the physicists agree. Furthermore, what they agree on can be used to predict the behavior of physical systems.
Contrast that to the economists. They cannot and do not agree on even the most basic elements of their "discipline". There is no core of economic theory upon which economists agree. They cannot even agree on whether there is such a thing as a free lunch. (The Fed appears to believe that they can create a free lunch merely by printing money.) Nor can they claim that economics is in its infancy. Adam Smith published his book in 1776 & he was by no means the first economist. In any other science, we'd expect to see progress in our understanding of the subject matter over the course of two centuries. This is not the case with economics.
As for the Austrians "predicting" the current economic mess, that depends on what you mean by "predicting". The physicist can tell you where the ball will be at any giving time. The best the Austrians can say is that there will be booms & busts -- they cannot tell when either will occur. They cannot even predict within a decade -- much less provide a prediction that is of any use whatsoever to any person trying to plan his finances. Their "predictions" are no better than Nostradamus's -- after an even occurs, the Austrians say they predicted that it would happen.
"Voodoo economics" is redundant. Economics is no more of a science than voodoo, astrology, or divination by examining the entrails of sheep. - CCoburn3, on 12/01/2008, -5/+2Now, a year after they say the recession started, the economists have officially determined that a recession started in December 2007. Economics is so far from being a science that it takes economists a year to determine that the economy isn't doing well.
And they get paid for being economists! It's good work if you can get it... - BlackBloke, on 12/01/2008, -0/+3Believe it or not, the natural sciences are not the only sciences. Things like psychology, sociology, and economics are also sciences. The bias in favor of empiricism over rationalism has been unfortunate.
I'd recommend these to help you either strengthen your argument or to change your thinking:
The Mantle of Science, by Murray Rothbard
http://mises.org/rothbard/mantle.asp
The Counter-Revolution of Science, by F. A. Hayek
http://www.amazon.com/Counter-Revolution-Science-F ...
Apriorism and Positivism in the Social Sciences, by Roderick Long
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/MU2005/mu05-Long3. ... - CCoburn3, on 12/02/2008, -2/+1They are only "sciences" because the practitioners choose to call them by that name. They are comparable to the "sciences" of astrology & alchemy.
Rationalism, by the way, is hogwash. It leads to error. The whole notion reminds me of Tom Lehrer's description of the new math-- The important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer. The rationalist argument is that logic & reason are all important -- much more important than being right about what happens in the real world. Thus rationalists discount observed phenomena. If what happens in the real world doesn't match the theory, then the data must be discarded.
That's OK in a fantasy land (where most economists have their intellectual life), but these people insist on applying their theories to the real world. And like good rationalists, they don't care that the results are not what their theories predicted -- rationalists cannot be bothered by mere facts.
Show me that your "science" yields better results than astrology & maybe you can make a case. But frankly, the world would be a better place if astrologers were running the Fed. At least then, there would be a few days out of the month when they got monetary policy right. Pure chance would dictate that the astrologers would not be wrong 100% of the time like the economists are.- rkbabang, on 12/08/2008, -0/+1The world would be a better place if no one was running the Fed because it didn't exist.
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