Answer to Question #286007 in Macroeconomics for Sheya

Question

What do you think are the defining characteristics of a science? Does the study of the economy have these characteristics? Do you think macroeconomics should be called a science? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Economics is the scientific study of the ownership, use, and exchange of scarce resources often shortened to the science of scarcity. Economics is often considered as a social science because it uses scientific methods to develop theories that can help explain the behaviour of individuals, groups and organizations. Economics attempts to explain economic behaviour, which arises when scarce resources are exchanged. Only difference it makes when comparing to pure science is in terms of methodology. Economists, like other social scientists, are not able to undertake controlled experiments in the way that chemists and biologists are. Hence, economists have to employ different methods, based primarily on observation and deduction and the construction of abstract models.

One of the primary arguments that are made against classifying economics as a science is a lack of testable hypotheses. Underlying the difficulty in developing and testing an economic hypothesis are the nearly unlimited and often unseen variables that play a role in any economic trend. The frequency of immeasurable variables in economics allows for competing, and sometimes contradictory, theories to coexist without one proving the other infeasible. This uncertainty has led some observers to label economics the dismal science. Much of the uncertainty of the dismal science, however, applies to the theoretical and overarching questions of macroeconomics. The scientific method, on the other hand, is regularly applied by economists in the field of microeconomics, including conducting quantitative studies in real world settings that produce verifiable and retested results. Additionally, continued advances in computing power and data processing allow economists to model increasingly complex simulations.

While economics increasingly uses scientific and mathematical methods to track and predict trends, conflicting models, theories and results at the macroeconomic scale prevent economics from providing empirical data as found in many of the natural sciences. These discrepancies and conflicts, however, are inherent in any social science, all of which require an element of interpretation rarely found in the natural sciences. The field of economics contains quantitative and qualitative elements common to all social sciences, and as long as social sciences exist as a class of sciences, economics fits within the class.