I believe economics should be a field of magical studies, which should be a field of psychology. Magical studies should also study the placebo effect, memetics, religious studies, somatopsychic and psychosomatic phenomena, faith exercise science, servitorology, paragenetics, and spellcrafting.
Comment on It's barely a science.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 14 hours ago
The question I always tend to have, when the subject of if economics is or isn’t a science comes up is: given that economies and trade are clearly things that exist (to the extent that any sort of human social interaction exists anyway), and that have measurable properties, it at least ought to be theoretically possible to analyze their behavior using the techniques of science. If you don’t think economics is a science, then if you were to use science to study those things, what field would you consider that work to belong to?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 13 hours ago
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 12 hours ago
Magic is just science without the burden of coherent theories that predict reliable experimental outcomes, which covers a lot more than psychology. I’d say it’s more like humanity spitballing science-ish ideas and seeing which ones pan out, than any one branch of science specifically.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 4 hours ago
No, magic is observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real, where “real"ness is a social construct. Thus, magical studies is a field exploring the engineering of social constructs.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 3 hours ago
I’m not sure what realness has to do with it. Magic tends to have some kind of theoretical framework to explain observable phenomena (god(s), the planets, “energies”, etc.) the same way scientific theories do, they even have some experimental frameworks (e.g. my church growing up had a cadre of old ladies who were touted as “good at praying” because they apparently had a good track record with the man upstairs. To my knowledge these claims were never validated in a properly controlled laboratory environment against a random sample of similar parishioners. They also happened to be voracious gossips who wielded private information as a weapon, which is a funny coincidence.) The phenomena that magic explains are “real” insofar as they are experiences that humans have, but the underpinning theories are often unfalsifiable and/or contradictory (“prayer works” and “god’s plan is unknowable and perfect, eternal and unchanging”). That’s what I mean about coherent theories and predictable results. I guess you could say that theories that make accurate predictions are “more real” but I don’t think it makes sense to think about the realness of a scientific theory. It’s either proven false or not proven false so far.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 7 hours ago
I think that economics is a science, but contrary to the insistence of many economists I have known, it is absolutely a soft science. This is not a pejorative (though I reluctantly admit that I used to view it as such). My view is that economists would be wise to learn from their fellow social scientists in other fields. That would do a lot to help improve the rigour of economics.
You raise an interesting point, but there’s more to science than just measuring stuff. Most of my beef with economics comes from how economists react when their model’s predictions don’t align with reality. If a physicist’s theory makes incorrect predictions, then there’s not really much wiggle room to explain away the problem. If a psychologist’s theory makes predictions that aren’t correct, then my impression is that “explaining away” errors by gesturing at additional complexities not able to be accounted for is a much more acceptable thing to happen. This isn’t necessarily bad, but rather seems to be a part of how knowledge production happens in the social sciences.
I can’t comment too much on the specifics, as I am very much not a social scientist. Like I said above though, I have come around from looking down on these fields. In fact, I’ve come to appreciate them precisely because the skills used in the soft sciences are so alien to me. Economics uses a heckton of quantitative methods, but the phenomena they study are fundamentally social in nature, and thus they reduce the utility of their work by trying to distance themselves from the social sciences
fishos@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
fossilesque@mander.xyz 13 hours ago
Depends on the question itself.
caradenada@feddit.cl 14 hours ago
Economics is scientific. Someone could argue that many aspects of neoclassical economics specifically are not scientific, but the study of economic phenomena would remain a scientific endeavor nonetheless.