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"Left wing kookiness"
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. |
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