Why is economics is an empirical science?

Question

please explain

Answer 1

As fate would have it, an economist has been posting on the topic du jour--the scientific status of economics: see Tyler Cowen here and here. Professor Cowen's perspective on this question (rather typical of economists, I fear) is well-expressed by a colleague of mine:

"I guess the reason that I think economics is a science is that empirical testing is a huge part of economics. I.e., if economics were only about the mathematical models, without falsifiable claims, I would agree it's not scientific. But economics makes falsifiable claims all the time and tests them frequently. And some are confirmed, repeatedly, and they become accepted wisdom. Others are falsified, and they fall by the wayside. Isn't that what science is all about?"

This isn't, however, what "science is all about" on any plausible account. Pest control, for example, would be a science on this account (exterminators operate with evidentiary hypotheses ["ah-ah, tell-tale rat droppings!"], which they test ["since it's rats, we'll lay this kind of poison"], and which are sometimes falsified ["well, I'll be damned, it turns out it's not rats, but field mice"]), which doesn't seem the right conclusion. And lots of paradigmatic scientific propositions ("there are black holes," "there are quantum singularities") wouldn't be "scientific", because they aren't falsifiable (I owe the examples to Larry Laudan). Some philosophers of science go further, and argue that no claims are falsifiable (on evidentiary or logical grounds) because of the underdetermination of theory by evidence (the "Duhem-Quine" thesis as it is known) (Laudan has interesting arguments against this point--a nice presentation is in the so-titled chapter on undeterdetermination in his Science and Relativism [Chicago, 1990], which is still the best introduction to the subject I've read.)

So empirical testing and falsfiability can't be all that's at stake here. So is economics a science?

As it happens, this is a topic I’ve written on a few years ago. What follows is excerpted, with some editing, from my contribution on “Holmes, Economics, and Classical Realism,” in S.J. Burton (ed.), The Path of the Law and Its Influence: The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The main subject of this essay was Holmes’s place in an intellectual tradition I denominate “classical realism.” But given Holmes’s prescient (for a lawyer) interest in economics as a predictive science, a section of the essay discussed this topic. There is little original here, mostly a synthesis of the work of others. “PJ,” below, is a reference to Posner’s The Problems of Jurisprudence. Some references and footnotes have been omitted; others have been inserted in to the text. I will be interested to hear from economists where I’ve gone wrong here. Do see the Addendum at the very end too.