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It's barely a science.
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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
671 points (97.3% liked)
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Economics is a funny one as ultimately it's a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many) that people often incorrectly lump in with maths.
Kinda tough for an academic to run meaningful experiments on an actual economy though beyond models and simulation. And as anyone who has watched a Gary Stevenson video or two will know, your average academic economist is pretty bad at models and simulations.
Though I guess even bad experiments are still experiments
Edit: typo
Most of them are pretty bad at anthro too tbh lol
If they were good at stuff they wouldn't be economists
Source: I'm an economist
Gary Stevenson is also an overconfident blow hard who thinks because he made money on the stock market he knows more than everyone. I'm a psychologist not an economist, I don't like economics, but this is all still wildly off base from what actually happens in academia. Economist don't run randomized control trial (RCT) style experiments. They use completely different techniques with different statistical methods to test assumptions. Are these as high quality for causal reasoning as a RCT study? No absolutely not. However I think the average person would be shocked at how much of every field of science does not confirm their studies to that gold standard and how difficult it is to match that exact specific scenario statistically.
Yes, we do run RCTs. There are entire branches of economics that can be entirely controlled for, double-blind and randomized. For example microeconomic theory and game theory.
Yes, there are fields that get unethical to experiment under as you scale things up (think macroeconomics), which is why we have famous papers like The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation - AJR.
Natural experiments are used all the time in many fields, especially the social sciences, for ethicality. That doesn't make them less valuable, as they test for things you would have never gotten to test for through RCTs, and don't serve as a "crutch" due to the lack of RCTs. They serve different purposes.
And that's just one aspect people get wrong, economics isn't all about straight lines like another (vehemently wrong) commenter was saying. It's also not about politics, even though the economics of politics are taught conceptually. At least in my European university, no one forced ideology with the study of the median voter theorem or Vickrey auctions, among many other topics.
Anyway, rant over. This whole post is a rage-bait and people engaging in it are either ignorant of the subject matter (totally fine if you're willing to learn and accept you're wrong) or simply rage-baiters themselves.
My apologies, I didn't mean to imply you never run RCTs, mostly that it's rarer that other disciplines and most of what lay people know of your science comes from non RCT work. I'll have to take a peak at that paper you linked as it looks interesting.
Your point on natural experiments is on point as they are dreams come true for many social scientists (thought sadly not always pleasant ones in recent times).
I also have to agree this post is pure rage bait. People dunk on social sciences all the time but would have their brains melt trying to learn Structural Equation Modeling and the concept of the Latent variable. My arguments with economists usually comes from my place as an IO psychologist who argues about labour and labour markets not if your science is real. It's sad how many will look st economics as useless in the same breadth they venerate figures like Marx. People need more education not less.
The actual foundation of economics.
This is an interesting perspective. I feel like I disagree with you, but I don't know why. Whenever I feel like this, it usually means that there is some interesting learning ahead of me if I am willing to chew on some ideas for a while, so thanks for writing this comment
...
Anthropology, as in what cultural arts are like in different groups of humanity? How is that a science? I even wanted to go into this field
Of course it is! We’re just animals, after all. Is documenting the behavior of different species of beetles a science? The only difference is that we can replicate behavior through culture, not just genes.