At 04:47 PM 7/20/01 +1200 K.Feete wrote:
>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.
AHEM! It happens to be *my job* to deal with economic facts every single
day. Basically the government pays me to look at data being collected
from the field and do a bit of first-order analyzation.
Just because Economics is hard, doesn't mean that it isn't a science.
Yes, the data is extremely hard to collect - but so is data about the first
couple seconds of the Big Bang, or about the core of the Earth. Just
because things are difficult, doesn't mean that the scientific method
cannot produce various truths.
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.)
Bingo.
There are a lot of areas that Economists understand pretty well, and in
those areas, our predictions are becoming pretty good. There are also
areas that we don't understand so good, and often those predictions turn
out to be not-so-good. So, we revise our models and try for new
predictions. I find it amazing that people try and discredit a *science*
because of wrong predictions.
Given that Economists have only had about 200 years with which to do this
stuff, you'd think we'd get some credit for how far we've come.
JDG
__________________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685
We are products of the same history, reaching from Jerusalem and
Athens to Warsaw and Washington. We share more than an alliance.
We share a civilization. - George W. Bush, Warsaw, 06/15/01
