[mikrl]

If economics is a science, how do you run an experiment?

Let’s say you want to see how phenomenon X scales as a function of population, and create a model X(p)

How do you set up N identical scenarios and, ceteris paribus, vary the population? You cannot.

Two separate nations are distinct systems. Setting up 2 identical factories next door, one with 100 staff and one with 1000 staff would be a monumental waste of effort, and what if the geographical separation, or airflow, or cloud cover, or… affected the experiment?

Let’s say you run a single economic experiment. How do you reproduce it? How does your counterpart reproduce it?

[thiagoharry]

You do not create experiments. You create models that try to explain the world and check your model predictions and what happens in the world. When the two disagree, you update the model and try to explain what went wrong. As you cannot make experiments to check, it is inevitable that you will end with more than one model for different school of thoughts. As is in all academic disciplines that are part of humanities. This is not like in the natural sciences where you can agree with a single model. Nonetheless, this is better than having no empirism or scientific method at all and having models built based on some logical axioms treated as the ultimate truth, as some unscientific parts of the economy do.

Moreover, in the natural sciences, you also cannot perform experiments for some parts of cosmology, for example. Nonetheless, you keep creating models in the hope that they would allow you to discover and predict more things and to interpret better the universe. If they do, your model clearly shows some benefits, even if in the future with more powerful technology, it could be disproved. Economy do not need to be so different than this.

[mikrl]

>Nonetheless, this is better than having no empiricism or scientific method at all and having models built based on some logical axioms treated as the ultimate truth

Like theories built on mathematics or logic?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shilling Austrian economics and I disagree with most assumptions of pure rationality, but I think an axiomatic approach to human decision making is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m sure preferences and biases have some mechanism we can quantify and explain from first principles.