Robert Sturgeon wrote:
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 15:13:56 -1000, Maren Purves
wrote:


paghat wrote:

In article , Greylock
wrote:


Good science is apolitical.


If one may define economics as political,

as a physicist I have a hard time defining economics (at least the areas
you go on to describe) as science ...


Economics is a subset of psychology

Uh...no. Not even close.

Economics is the study of choice under constraint. The
field doesn't care in the least WHY consumer preference
is what it is; preferences are taken as a given.
Psychologists may wish to understand human preferences;
economists don't.

An economics professor I once had told us of an alleged
contest, maybe back in the 1940s or 1950s, to define
economics in 30 words or fewer. I still remember the
definition he gave us, over 30 years ago:

Economics is the branch of learning that deals
with the social organization and process by which
the scarce means of production are directed towards
the satisfaction of human wants.

- psychology applied to
matters of money, assets, liabilities, production, buying
and selling, that sort of thing. If psychology is a science
(a highly questionable If), then so is economics.

Economics is, without question, the most rigorous of
all the social sciences. Nothing else comes close.
Political science has gotten a lot better than it once
was, but that was because economics "invaded" the field
and began applying numerical analysis to issues
poli-sci simply couldn't explain, e.g. why people vote
(poli-sci couldn't come close to explaining it.)
Psychology and esp. sociology are thoroughly
unscientific: there are too many political ends to be
served.

To the extent that advances in economic theory come
from peer reviewed articles, and because economics is
far and away the most mathematized of all the social
sciences, it is probably scientific enough.