Comment by lysace
6 hours ago
I mentally place economic sciences sort of halvway between e.g. physics and social sciences on some imagined scientific rigidity scale.
They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena as the neoclassical school of economics is.
If sociology is so much more rigorous, why aren't sociologists invading the economic field? Surely they can use their rigorous statistics to produce papers on economic matters and put the entire field to shame?
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
Are you saying linear regression = statistics? Linear regression is something you learn in your first class, it's hardly ever the main model used.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
Define neoclassical economics beyond its use in the blogossphere
It's a school of economics that became dominant in the 60s, it emphasises free market dynamics, much like the classical school, and especially focuses on consumption and optimizing economic actors, these actors are a very simple (and unrealistic) model of consumers. They also neglect production as an aspect of the economy.
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
This is completely false. The opposite is true. Economics had drastically improved reproduction over decades.
Please provide some proof that neoclassical economics has done this.
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