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 Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
You're missing a rather subtle point. There is a reason why our understanding of evolution is robust and predictive in ways that our understanding of economics isn't.
We have a mechanism to calibrate our modeled understanding of evolution. It's the mechanism that allows us to discover and describe genetics. We can guess and check via the scientific method. Which is not something you can do with economics. Because you can't experiment with an economy like you can with living organisms. Economies are hard to observe, hard to isolate, hard to play with.
Science has a way to discover the mechanism of heredity/mutation/speciation - DNA. Economics does not yet have a way to discover the mechanism of the invisible hand/benefitial competition/whatever we're doing.
From VS Ramachandrans explanation of Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA
"It is well known that Crick and Watson unraveled the double helical structure of the DNA molecule: two twisting complementary strands of nucleotides. Less well known is the chain of events culminating in this discovery.
First, Mendel's laws dictated that genes are particulate (a first approximation still held to be accurate). Then Thomas Morgan showed that fruit flies zapped with x-rays became mutants with punctate changes in their chromosomes, yielding the clear conclusion that the chromosomes are where the action is. Chromosomes are composed of histones and DNA; as early as 1928, the British bacteriologist Fred Griffith showed that a harmless species of bacterium, upon incubation with a heat-killed virulent species, actually changes into the virulent species! This was almost as startling as a pig walking into a room with a sheep and two sheep emerging. Later, Oswald Avery showed that DNA was the transformative principle here. In biology, knowledge of structure often leads to knowledge of function—one need look no further than the whole of medical history. Inspired by Griffith and Avery, Crick and Watson realized that the answer to the problem of heredity lay in the structure of DNA. Localization was critical.
Crick and Watson didn't just describe DNA's structure, they explained its significance. They saw the analogy between the complementarity of molecular strands and the complementarity of parent and offspring—why pigs beget pigs and not sheep. At that moment modern biology was born."
Ain't nothing like this in any of the economic literature I've ever seen. And if there is, I desparately want to read it.
I hesitate to make this point because it becomes a very harried discussion from here on out that calls back to the philosophy of science that no one in their right mind would want to get in to, but this is the core of my difficulty with economics. I know why I can trust the theoretical explanations underlying the behavior of planes, but not why I should trust similar explanations for the behavior of unregulated free markets.
I think economics is more robust than you think, but you are correct that social sciences are the least of the experimental. Any step less experimental and it looks like humanities and art
However, there is a load of data and theory in economics. There's still a lot of algebra and consensus views. As far as I can tell, the technical stuff is almost never discussed by any who are not themselves hardcore economics academics. A big part of the reason why people think economics is lacking in any level of robustness is two things: (1) most trained in economics are in micro, not macro, and macro is very different than micro. (2) It's political. Even trained academics let their politics override way too often
Regardless, I think the public vastly overestimates the disagreement between PhDs. There's a lot of consensus, but few people listen
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