economics is not a hard science

Stop using this abusive, fascist sycophant as a meme template.

Damn right. Fuck Crowder. Abusive spouse, sexually abusive co-worker.
Never even knew the original. What was it?
- Steven Crowder

First you would have to find someone who thought economics were closer to physics.

No, at least someone who graduated kindergarden.

Theres an interesting book on it, literally "Physics of wall street". Or that was the literal name translated from my language. It explored the similarities between the two, can recommend.
- Thanks, looks like an interesting book. Looks like he also wrote on misinformation.

is this a controversial opinion? i think pretty much every economist would tell you it's a social science

I think the internet thinks economics is a hard science. I think it’s mostly due to the math involved.
- It isn't a difficult science from a learner's PoV.
  It is, however, difficult in a sense of trying to figure out why in the world what happened happened, and most importantly, making it possible to do again.
  That's because not only can you not experiment, you only gather data from observations, but once you share the product of your studies the reality changes in reacton to it.
  In same Physics the object of your studies doesn't simultaniously study you.
  Math gets involved to get a result that is somewhat reproducable. But even then since we can't factor everything we use degrees of probability/certainty.
  Theoretically speaking if we managed to fully understand human behaviour then we coult predict the outcome of everything. As you can imagine, we're nowhere close to being able to do that.
  Back to original post, yes, economics is closer to psychology than it is to physics. At least for the fact that we study human behaviour, but on a different scale. So sociology and political science are the closest, then psychology, next all of biological sciences, and chemistry, physics and everything related come last pretty much.
  Math doesn't fit anywhere here, since it's a tool for measuring reality and not a study of reality itself.
- There is no math involved in economics. Every equation in the field is a definition.
No one who has even the faintest idea of what physics is would be able to conflate it with economics. About the only way the two are related is that they’re both studied by people to the point that you can get a degree that focuses on either.
- I think you would be surprised how much math used in physics is used in economics and then there is statistics which is heavily used in both.

There is a specific area of economics that deals with psychology: behavioral economics.

Also, can we retire using Steven Crowder, who abused his wife for years, as a meme?

My mind did tricks with that last comma , "You know, that funny meme where he abused his wife"
- Maybe he did abuse her as a meme, we don't know his motives

And even psychology is extremely dubious. Just look at the recent Stanford scandal, and the replication crisis a few year ago....
Unfortunately, publication pressure turned psychology into total junk. You can't really believe anything unless several other institutions replicated the experiments (and good luck getting funding for that).
- You can't really believe anything unless several other institutions replicated the experiments (and good luck getting funding for that.)
  Shouldn't that be the case with every scientific discipline?
I mean, define experimental?
Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychology of judgement and decision making, which drives our economic models. He's a psychologist.
Any definition of experimental that fits psychology will fit economics.
I agree.
Economics, sociology and political science are the trifecta of sciences that cover human societies, rather than human individuals.
Psychology is closer to medicine. It is complex and unpredictable, because humans are complex and unpredictable, but they approach the subject empirically and can actually achieve consistentcy. For example, we are getting really good at helping people with PTSS, ADHD, Autism, learning difficulties, etc.
I would say economics, sociology and political science are at the lowest rung on the "certainty" totempole. These sciences are forever stuck in the "we don't know what we don't know, so we are driving blind" mode of operation. They only succeed in analysing and narrating what happened after the fact. At best, they prevent us from repeating some mistakes in the most obvious ways. But they also enable us to repeat old mistakes in novel ways.
The only reason people confuse economics with the hard sciences, is because it has a Nobel prize.
But it really should be seen as an equivalent to the Nobel peace and literature prizes, in a separate league of the physics, medicine and chemistry ones.
Even economists themselves call their science the dismal science.
All this said, Economists are true and capable scientists (well, some are corrupt and biased, but some doctors are, too. That's not an indictment of the whole field).
Their subject is just difficult to analyze.
Sociology is an actual science with a methodology and it tries to learn from other sciences.
Economy considers it pure like maths despite the evidences it is not the case.
Economy is pseudo-science at its best.
- Economy` is pseudo-science at its best.
  This sentence doesn't even make sense.
  Econometrics is highly research driven and evidence based. In it's simplest form econometrics says if you put prices down you will (usually) sell more of your product. You'd dismiss this observation as pseudo-science?
Psychology is "experimental" only in its loosest possible definition.
- Wrong

That's dubious. Considering that economists deliberately ignore strong established psychological theories to make theirs work. Economical theory also runs contrary to a lot of established notions of sociology. Economics is closer to politics than to any science.

Economists are there to perform the job that Theology departments used to do: provide a mystical moral justification of whatever the assholes in charge want to do to everybody else.

We've had 3 "once in a lifetime" financial meltdowns in like 25 years now.
Our banks need bailing out like every 10 years.
The arrogance of thinking that we've figured out the economy even in the Newtonian sense is part of why, I think.
Like, I hear you, but at the same time it just doesn't align with even the broadest observations.
And when a theory doesn't align with observed data, I have to be critical of the theory...
I'm interested in if you can expand your explanation to account for it, though. It's super low stakes and I don't think it's really possible to prove any of it so I think it's a great subject for thought experiments.
- I mean, we see the exact same uncertainty all the time in real-world applications of the hard sciences as well.
  Weather prediction, for example, is still just as inexact a science as macroeconomics in its application, even though it's entirely physics-driven and we have a pretty complete understanding of each of the variables involved on a theoretical level. The system is just complex and chaotic enough that understanding the theory of weather doesn't mean that we can successfully model the real-world behavior of weather.
  This doesn't mean that we should conclude that all theory relating to weather is incorrect - that would we throwing the baby out with the bathwater - it just means we still have a ways to go when modeling the real-world complexities that come with the theory.
- We have a fairly solid understanding of an ideal economy. If the economy was run according to current theory, we'd avoid a lot of issues (and find new ones we would address, of course).
  However, the economy is run according to political whims, so most of the economic theory gets thrown out the window. It's pretty easy to run into major issues when nothing stays consistent for more than a couple years, and the interests of those in charge do not include a stable and sustainable economy.

Hard science — inquiry into the nature of the “hard materials” like rocks.

Social science — inquiry into shared meanings on the material stuff around us, including the “hard materials” like mountains, and “soft intangible stuff” like taboos and beliefs, prices, and demand.

A lot of people assume “hard” means the serious stuff and social science as the easy and abstract stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Economics is a social science. Sadly, the fascination with it being “hard” is largely to be seen as the cool tough stuff. Inferiority complex, if you may.

Economists rarely actually work as hard as Sociologists or similar soft sciences.
- I would actually love to hear you elaborate on that.
  In what way sociologists work harder than economists?
  I'd argue that when it comes to science, you can't study economics without studying sociology and politics. Because then you will be lacking context. Wouldn't that mean more research?
  In fact, how do you define "hard work"?
  I'm acually curious, it's an interesting topic.
- Life goes smoothest when you recognize that effort is a limited resource

No one here has acknowledged the difference between classical economics and neoclassical economics (or even the difference with post-keynesian economics). Classical economics makes descriptions and predictions that can be falsified.

It also takes into account social context by understanding the social forces that come into play in a society at a given point. For example, the profit motive is understood as a historical force reinforced by capitalism itself.

All of this is modeled in a stochastic manner, which reflects both the variation in human behavior and the strong tendencies in human behavior. Once again, these models are testable.

All of this contrasts with the idealized and unscientific notion of economics that was cooked up at the end of the 18th century: neoclassical economics. This is what is taught to most people.

Neoclassical economics doesn't seek to describe the forces that motivate human beings as much as assume that people are utility maximizers. Therefore, social context is explained reductively. Predictions are harder, because what leads the way isn't evidence, but assumptions. Of course, there's a political component to not show capitalism as a historical reality as much as both a reflection of universal truths of human nature and a desirable social arrangement.

It's sad to confirm that neoclassical economics has dominated the economics departments and school curricula of the world. However, many scholars fortunate enough to be given a stable job despite not believing in the contemporary doctrine are doing amazing work. For example, Shaikh.

With this in mind, classical economics has to resemble physics to the extent that physics describes stochastic processes. In fact, Shaikh explicitly recognizes that pressure as a measure is a stochastic measure because, even though you can't predict the trajectory of a single atom, you can predict how many atoms will interact on an aggregate level. The same happens with humans.

This is really interesting, although some of it goes over my head! Can you recommend any good videos on the subject?

Economics is an extremely broad field, encompassing things that are closely related to psychology (e.g. behavioral economics), and things that are related to physics and natural science (e.g ecological economics), as well as pure mathematics (e.g. game theory) so trying to say it has more in common with one than the other is kind of a vacuous statement or category error.

To those who are angry at normative claims and policy prescriptions from the economic orthodoxy/zeitgeist, I understand your frustration. I would say what you're angry at is not economics itself (which is simply the study of scarcity and related human behavior) but economics done badly. Such as the Chicago school.

Setting aside the emotional baggage related to these issues, there are some really beautiful and fascinating topics in economics that borrow very directly from statistical physics in the analysis of financial time series data (and also apply to a wide variety of fields like network traffic, the distribution of metals in ore, turbulent flows in fluid dynamics, and the distribution of galaxies in space), originally identified by Benoit Mandelbrot.

It's crazy how much people will vehemently defend a position with little to no knowledge of the subject. It's easy to just pin it on the dunning-kruger effect, but in this case I think it's definitely tied to how much people despise economists. Which I find kinda funny since it's like getting angry at the weatherman for bad weather.
Also, are there any communities dedicated to actually discussing economics? I'd really like to spitball actual solutions to a shitty economy rather than the wishful thinking capitalists & communists rely on.
- I can sympathize with them, as the way economic thought is portrayed in popular journalism makes it seem like ivory tower eggheads concocting overly-mathematized models to support bad policies. And I do believe there is some truth to this, with bad economists hiding shitty ideas behind the veneer of respectability that math provides. Science and technology are almost fetishized in our culture, especially by those who don't really study them academically, and I believe disingenuous economists and politicians use this fact to their advantage.
  What they must realize is that whatever flaws they might identify to overhaul these bad economic models leads to... more economics! Hopefully better economics. But they're still participating in the field known as economics.
  For instance, noting that the "homo economicus" doesn't exist IRL isn't really the gotcha that many people think it is. Rather, anybody doing economics properly is acutely aware of this fact, and is just exploring the limits of what such a simplifying assumption can yield. E.g. a surprisingly large mileage from the very parsimonious axioms of utility given by Von Neumann and Morgenstern. The really interesting and difficult part is thinking about how and why real life data deviates from the predictions made by the simple assumptions.
numerology surely. Because you can properly use mathematical operations and statisticsl tools in ways that are physically meaningless.
A sled-dog laden with taxidermied heads goes faster and faster as heads are removed. The economist is surprised but the biologist is not when removing the final head doesn't make the dog run even faster, but stops it dead.
Behavioral economics was my favorite and I'd say it's tied closely to game at its core, they're both trying to predict human choices game theory just tries to quantify it with math. None of it is "pure math" it's all theory with math attempting to support it. It's only in like the last 100 years math even came into economic theory. I always enjoyed reading theory from the less recent economists (before they were even called economists) because it's more pure theory/philosophy.

Hey come on now, don't insult psychology by comparing it to economics.

The primary function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

More like astrology, it’s all just correlation til the models fails and then they invent a new one

and then they invent a new one
Well, do they?
- Trickle down baby!
  https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED153/5efca02de9e21.jpeg
You can use astrology as a very, very crude psychological model.

Wait, do people actually disagree with this? I thought this was just common knowledge.

Maybe they mistyped psychics? I get all my stock market advice from fortune tellers.

Pretty sure this isn't that controversial of an opinion. Pretty sure any economist that disagrees with you is a shit economist. There's a reason there's a related field called "socioeconomics"

Also fuck this meme format. Stop using this facist for memes.

Economics started as a branch of philosophy that got a lot of support because it draw a lot of support for its theory from maths.

Then, more recently, a good number of very inteligent people noticed the behaviours of economic models could be better predict and understood by using very simple psychological analysis and models.

I remember reading an article by two physicists where they just picked the oh-so-precious math of a given economic model, analysed it using the methods used to analyse physics and concluded the model was faulty by x+y+z.

Economics is... a very strange thing.

All science started as an offshoot from Philosophy.
- Yes but most people tend to think Economics is an offshoot of Mathematics, due to its connection with it.

Exam questions are the same every year. But the answers are different.

Steven Crowder is an assclown.

There's an assumption there that psychology is not a hard science. An assumption that I agree with though.

No science started out as a "hard science". Psychology is hard to quantify yet, because our currently available options for measurements are insufficient.
- Hard sciences are reducible. Pharmacology reduces to biology, reduces to chemistry, reduces physics.
  The hard science of the brain and mind is neuroscience.

It's a branch of sociology dominated by people who refuse to accept sociological research practices in the name of deluding themselves that they're uncovering grand truths about the universe. It would be hilarious and sad if politicians and journalists didn't listen to them.

If you look up soft science you will see them lumped together. I dont even know why this is even said, everyone knows this.

The invisible hand is just bullshit and prices in our economy are often centrally planned by a monopoly or a cartel that decides how an industry ought to set prices.

Current day Economics is just propoganda.

What are some centrally planned prices?
- Not the OP and IMO centrally planned prices doesn't really apply to cartels, but a cartel set price that nearly everyone is familiar with is OPEC+ prices for petroleum.
- I think Aesthelete better cleared up what I am trying to say using OPEC as an example. Other versions of this behavior is in Dairy / Milk in the US. They're wasting millions of gallons of milk in order to keep the price higher where it's set by a central planner in the industry. Farmers will choose certain days to sell their crop as to try and get the highest price - and this is an innocent behavior - but capitalism literally has a built-in mechanism to encourage this form of price stability. Another bad example is poultry production in the US. There's 4 companies only, and small farmers actually license and rent all of the stuff from the big 4. These farmers are treated so terribly, and at the end of the day they don't actually get to sell or set the price. The central company does.

Economics isn’t a science because there’s no way to falsify hypotheses or theories.

It's possible to do that in Economics, but most of them are very unethical. It's not impossible.
For example, you would have to have complete control over an economy to make experimental changes. Say increasing interest rates just for certain subjects and leaving them alone for the control group. It would be very illegal.
Usually economists take advantage of local law changes to observe the results. Like you can look at the effects of increasing minimum wage on unemployment by looking at cities that do it before and after. Or you can compare similar states that when some of them pass a law, but others don't.
The movie "Trading Places" is a kind of unethical economic experiment, although the record keeping was sparse.
- We have video games and simulation to do any sort of things. Politics to try new things.
  Economy is pseudo-science.
Also they can change the way the "world" works to fit a bad hypothesis, whereas in science the hypothesis has to change.

Economics is like weather forecasting, but less reliable.
- Funny enough, this is a really underrated comment @snooggums
  It's like most of the weather forecasters predicting the weather by watching other weather forecasters
  And people making bets on cyclones and hurricanes
  And if you get enough weather forecasters to agree it will rain, then it will rain.
  With people cheering for sunny skies and rain clouds, and then arguing over breaks in the clouds vs gathering storms

“Water makes most things it touches wet. Change my mind.”

This is a normal standpoint for anyone who has any meaningful knowledge of the world. The whole study of economics depends on a social construction - the economy.

Does it matter tho? It's all useful in some way or another.

Well, as a matter of fact, economy is actually detrimental to societies.
- Partially true, a bad economy is indeed very detrimental to society. People starve, people don't get healthcare. People die.
- You might need to back that up with info...

But does psychology have lines that go up like stonks?

If you made a graph of how many people have mental illness on a timeline starting from the inception of psychology to now, then yes.

the number of comments here who use hard sciences' criteria as the ones and only defining the validity of knowledge is concerning. Human sciences don't have the same foundations, methodologies, etc. as harde sciences, they don't have the same system of validation either, which doesn't mean it's less valid.

Economics is a branch of philosophy. It doesn’t just observe norms, it creates them. Any descriptive model in economics is also prescriptive.

If a well-regarded economist publicly says the stock market will crash tomorrow, then it will crash, regardless of the soundness of their logic leading up to the statement — even if it was the result of a cocaine binge, botched autocorrect, or a stroke.

This is why treating economics like a hard science is so dangerous. If the prevailing “thought leaders” advocate for a model that says XYZ people are mathematically doomed to live in abject, dehumanizing squallor… then that’s exactly what will happen, regardless of whether that was true before they said it.

Edit: It’s also why it’s such a crime that we only teach neoclassical economics in K-12, as if it’s the One True Way™.

Our econ prof told us "Never trust a statistic you haven't forged yourself".

Now hold on guys... I think I would put it slightly more useful than reading tea leaves.

Ceteris paribus, or all things equal is a super common economics phrase. It's basically impossible to maintain in the real world. Economics used to be considered philosophy for a reason. As someone with a economics degree I do pretty much agree with you.

The "hard science" part of it is using past data to build models. You're still more or less trying to tie the figures into a theory of why they happened that may or may not be true. There are so many factors it's impossible to know. For instance I truly believe that the stronger anti-monopoly enforcement and higher taxes played a major role in America's success and the rise of the middle class from post WW2-80s. I have to admit that there are an insane amount of other factors at play here that might invalidate all the trends during the same time though. Every other developed countries info structure being bombed to the ground giving the US a huge start not being the least of which.

Well, the human mind is based on chemistry/physics sooo

You can say that about anything that isn't abstract sooo

This implies psychology is not a hard science.

Just because a physicist wouldn’t know how to do science in a realm as complex as psychology doesn’t mean psychologists don’t know how to.

Only thing any of them share in common is that they link back to the Wikipedia page for Philosophy.

Have to love this meme

Economy is pseudo-science. Change my mind.

I more believe that physics governs economies. Meanwhile, economics provides insights into how the resources are done by physics.

Economics is just a tool of politics.

You’re just a tool of politics
- Your mother.

Ah yes, let me use my Lagrangian to optimize the system, because this is what psychologists do.

Now that we did that, let's take the derivative of the rectangular area of this curve to maximize it, like a psychologist would.

Definitely. I've seen examples of economists failed attempts at math. It explained a lot about the state of the economy.