Economics does have some lovely mathematics, interesting ideas, but it is not really an experimental science. Eric D. Beinhocker book, The Origin of Wealth is an interesting critique of modern economics and the problems inherent in its use in modeling the real-world. From the Nobel Prize point of view, a prize makes sense because so much of modern decision making is informed by economics, right or wrong. BTW, the economics prize was not one of the original Nobel Prizes and was not created by Alfred Nobel.