
In Search of the Science in Economics - bpolania
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-14/seeking-science-in-a-social-science-like-economics
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kleer001
"You don’t need matrix analysis to know that if you tell everyone to wash
their hands, infections will go down."

No, but you will need a well designed study or two, maybe a few accidental
experiments (situations where a single variable is changed among two randomly
selected groups of people), to tell if it's actually true.

And it may be that your hypothesis is incorrect. It may be that telling
everyone to wash their hands actually makes infections go up in some specific
contexts. I can imagine a couple scenarios where that might be the case. One
is the false sense of security of the washing hands message leads to a
slightly sloppier application of other protocols such as sterilization of
tools or cleaning furniture. Or the means of spreading the message its self,
say on plastic posters, could be a breeding ground of airborn bacteria. Sure,
these are highly improbable, and there's even more I can't imagine, but I
wanted to point out that the original hypothesis isn't as airtight as the
author intended... if taken literally.

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dekhn
Damn straight! THere are a lot of things in medical science where people say
"Oh, this is obvious. X causes Y, so if we eliminate X, Y will go away."
Running careful experiments with proper controls and randomization is the only
way to come to the appropriate knowledge required to make good policy. This is
just as true in economics and every other science as well.

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cLeEOGPw
Nobody argues that social sciences are useless because it's impossible to find
patterns. People argue that social sciences are useless because they find
random pattern in a specific data and don't attempt to reproduce the result.
And when attempted, turns out that most of them are just random patterns that
only occur in that study data and don't correspond to everyone.

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kephra
The main problem of social science like history or economy is that they are
political shaped sciences. Both pick those pattern that fit into their world
view, to form a religion like truth of how the world worked. And state payed
historian or economic scientist will normally preach the view of their system.

I did not have time for this year Riksbanks Rris, but e.g. in 2013 we saw a
typical price " should discard its mathematical pretensions " and better just
tell its political agenda straight. Instead they used a positivistic computer
simulation, which basically means: I have a row of theories (CAPM, OPT, EHM,
...) that have several unknowns and I tweak their parameters till simulation
shows the results that I want to show.

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cLeEOGPw
So they find random pattern in specific data. It wouldn't be bad if their
results fit some political agenda, as long as the results are truth. Problem
is it's not just a matter of showing results that fit political agenda and
remaining silent about ones that doesn't fit. Problem is that almost
everything, fits agenda or not, is false, ireproducible random noise. You
almost never see the results building on earlier results in social science,
like it is in all other sciences. You only see "studies" spewed out like from
some kind of social study generator, and none of these matter even to
themselves as they are forgotten as soon as they are published.

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tempodox
_the idea that economics is only a social science_

That's exactly how I see it. And the only way to put science into “social
science” is the proper application of statistics. Kurt Tucholsky's observation
that _sociology was invented so people could write without experience_ is
still true today.

