real-world economics review, issue no. 94 subscribe for free
Is economics a science? Andri W. Stahel [Universitat Popular del Baix Montseny, UPBM, Barcelona, Spain] Copyright: Andri W. Stahel, 2020
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https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-94/ Economists’ Haiku Science or not? I look out the window: The answer is no. Abstract After more than a century of near-complete hegemony of the neoclassic paradigm in the academy, we take it for granted that economics, as it is nowadays practised, is a science in the same sense we believe other fields of scientific inquiries to be. Although many critiques and dissenting voices can and have been heard questioning various aspects of different theories and models, the overall scientificity of economics as such has mostly been left unquestioned. Economists still present themselves as experts, Nobel and various other prizes in economics are awarded, thousands of papers are published in “scientific journals”, and hundreds of thousands of students engage in their studies worldwide to become professional economists. All following a remarkably similar student plan and curriculum all around the world. However, in this paper, I go a step further and ask the question, not without hesitation due to the seriousness of the negative answer I propose to it, whether economics as it is practised nowadays by experts and presented to the public at large, can be considered a science at all. More than the question about whether we have good or bad economic science, it is the whole edifice and the way modern economics has come to be, which is, thus, being questioned.
Introduction To the question proposed by this paper, to stay in the realm of scientific debate, a somewhat completer answer than the haiku stated above may be needed… For a start, the answer certainly depends on how we define “science” in the first place. If we consider science in empirical and heuristic terms, as a way to grasp and get to terms with actual reality, current economic theories based on abstractions and generalisations aiming at universally valid “models” and “economic laws” have shown to be of little help to understand concrete and specific historically changing economic realities. The idea, as proposed explicitly by the founders of the currently hegemonic neoclassic approach in economics, that the economic reality can be studied and approached scientifically by applying the mathematical, modelbased deductive method borrowed from Newtonian physics, did not seem to live up to its promises. It has lead, instead, to a scientific practice which has been increasingly alienated from empirically observed economic reality, dwelling in the creation of sometimes sophisticated mathematical models which, nevertheless, failed to predict important real-world events in the past. Nor has it allowed us to understand better the more profound historical, cultural, political and ecological forces shaping our economic life in the present. If we take a Popperian falsificationist perspective (Popper, 1959) and evaluate economics’ scientific status in terms of the theoretical predictions made by the theory which may be revealed to be false by future observations; economics’ practice of basing its models on a series of restrictive, non-empirically observable assumptions and particularly on the allpervasive ceteris paribus assumption leaving crucial variables relevant to the real-world developments out of their models, can certainly not be assumed to be “scientific”. By
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