John D. Giorgis wrote:
>At 12:01 AM 7/19/01 -0500 Dan Minette wrote:
>>I would tend to disagree. I know the "social sciences" consider themselves
>>science, but there is a lot of difference between ecconomics and science.
>>Compare the predictive ability of the best ecconomist with the 100,000th
>>best physicist. :-)
>
>But that's irrelevant.
>
>To quote Alfred, Lort Tennyson "science is trained and ordered common sense."
>
>You can't define a science based on the ability of its most trained members
>to make predictions. That definition is unworkable.
>
>The question is whether or not the specialists rigorously apply the
>scientific method to their work. On this basis, I think that Economics
>most certainly qualifies.
Yes. So does psychology, socialogy, and environmental science- the "soft"
or "social" sciences. Economics is one of them. They're sciences, but
different from "hard" (or "real" if you're an arrogant bastard <grin>)
sciences in extremely significant ways, such as the lack of hard, certain
facts.
I know I don't know much about economics, but I'm pretty sure that at its
heart it's based on trends and the whims of the human mind to make a
decision one way or another. This whims and trends may be analyzed in a
perfectly scientific way, and they *are*, but it's still different from
predicting the path of an atom, because it's *people* we're talking about
here. People are, AFAIK, less predictable than atoms. (Uncertainty
principle notwithstanding.)
Kat Feete
-------------------------------
"I know about people who talk about suffering for
the common good. It's never bloody them! When you
hear a man shouting "Forward, brave comrades!"
you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock
and the one wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!"
-Rincewind the Wizzard
Terry Pratchett
