Why is economics considered as the Queen of all Social Sciences?

Question

Well, we all know that Social Science is all about the study of people and the factors relating to it..

So my question here, why is economics considered the QUEEN of all Social Sciences?

Why not the other branches of Social Science?

Answer 1

Economics explains a lot of the social phenomena of the world and plays a major role in each of the other branches.(i.e. In sociology: haves vs. have nots, crime, what's going on in society; In political science: why countries do what they do, international trade, even war; In psychology: a person's mindset is affected by their socio-economic status; etc).

Answer 2

Economics deals with things that are relatively easy to count. Most of the variables in economics - income, employment, inflation, wages, output, etc - can have precise numbers attached to them. It helps that money is a universal unit of account.

In economic life, it is also generally clear what people are trying to achieve (e.g. firms usually try to maximize profit, governments try to maximize national output, households try to maximize their consumption, etc). This involves a bit of simplification, but these assumptions are generally valid and make things easy to model.

That makes economics a relatively "hard" science. It is comparatively easy to work out the "laws" that determine how these different variables interact, and model these mathematically.

Now compare that with other social sciences - political science, sociology, history, anthropology etc. Although there's some stuff that you can measure, there are lots of key concepts - ideology, culture, human nature, etc - which are extremely vague or subjective.

In practice, the best way ahead for many of these other social sciences has been to borrow the tools that have been developed in economics.