Thou Doth Protest Too Much

Whenever one sees a person protesting a bit too much one should become suspect. Take the recent protestations of a Noble winner in Economics, that field of philosophy which deals with the rather obtuse interconnections of data from the economies of various countries.

His protestations state:

Critics of “economic sciences” sometimes refer to the development of a “pseudoscience” of economics, arguing that it uses the trappings of science, like dense mathematics, but only for show. For example, in his 2004 book Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb said of economic sciences: “You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations, and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment.”

Economics as we currently see it is half political philosophy, there really is no political science unless one tries to include the polling of putative voters, and half data gathering. The philosophy and data gathering are all too often  layered upon by pseud mathematical justifications.  This does not make it a science.

He then states:

But physics is not without such critics, too. In his 2004 book The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, Lee Smolin reproached the physics profession for being seduced by beautiful and elegant theories (notably string theory) rather than those that can be tested by experimentation. Similarly, in his 2007 book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law, Peter Woit accused physicists of much the same sin as mathematical economists are said to commit.

But this is theoretical physics. After all when Einstein proposed his theory of relativity it took more than a decade to demonstrate it. It was theoretical but it could be proven and was. One could do an experiment and the experiment could be repeated and the results were the same. Try that one in economics.

He continues:

But all the mathematics in economics is not, as Taleb suggests, charlatanism. Economics has an important quantitative side, which cannot be escaped. The challenge has been to combine its mathematical insights with the kinds of adjustments that are needed to make its models fit the economy’s irreducibly human element.

 Mathematics in science is done to do predictive tasks. Like how heavy will a tower of water be and how strong must the beams be to support it. Economics cannot do anything of that simple tasks with any of its mathematics.

Thus the attempt to call is science fails on the most critical point, ability to predict. It is not a science but a philosophy, like political philosophy. Let's stop trying to put lipstick on the pig!