I like what I heard Tyler Cowen say a long time ago: a degree in economics is a great way to learn about a lot of ideas that sound good but don't work. (I'm paraphrasing, of course)
I thought his point was great. There's some well-trodden ground in economics. If you learn nothing more but where the alligators are, you're probably going to do a lot better on that trip through the swamp you plan on taking. If nothing else, it tends to elevate the conversation.
Let's be a bit more specific here before people get the wrong idea. Economics doesn't work for predicting the stock market. Other than that, it works just fine. The principals of supply and demand and huge host of other issues are just fine and work great. It just doesn't translate to predicting equities.
It doesn't translate to predicting anything, stock market included. Economics is an art, not a science. Society is the petri dish on whch experiments are carried out, and even in the smallest experiments, you can't really isolate environmental variables like you can in say in a physics experiment. Every economic theory is prefaced with "all other things remaining equal", which should invalidate them right then and there.
It's ultimately a study of the impact of the decisions societies make, and even then, the metrics it uses are often poor indicators of quality of life. Apartheid South Africa was the continent's bread basket on the basis of its mining output and high GDP per capita. But that wealth was concentrated in the hands of the white minority and not used to improve infrastructure and education for the colonized majority. That was badly needed to fuel long-term growth and build an economy that wasn't dependent on commodities prices.
> You can't really isolate environmental variables like you can in say in a physics experiment.
Astrophysics is kind of in the same boat. You can't really set up a proper test and control - you're forced to do what you can with the datasets that are available.
As W. Brian Arthur has observed, vrtually all of economics ultimately boils down to questions of policy. There is effectively no theoretical (as opposed to policy-oriented) economics, let alone a truly experimental sort. This applies not just to orthodoxy, but many heterodoxies as well.
The notion that science is of necessity experimental is fundamentally false. Experiments are useful, but the core of science is that it is observational, you might call it experiential, with hypotheses and observational tests (of which experiments are one subclass) being used to form theories and models.
The scope of, say, experimental cosmology, meterology, geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and ecology are ... fairly small. Though not entirely nonexistent. Famous proofs, or validations, of Einsteins theory of general relativity were observational, based on star positions during solar eclipses and of Mercury's orbit. Neither of which lend themselves readily to laboratory experiments.
Similarly, simulations are a powerful tool in many disciplines.
Geology is an interesting case on several counts.
It's among the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back thousands of years, to at least ancient Greece (Theophrastus, 372–287 BCE, Peri Lithon). It has been almost entirely observational, rather than experimental. As recently as the late 18th century, the Earth was thoght to be unknowably old (James Hutton, I believe), and through the 20th, informed and scientific views differed by orders of magnitude. It wasn't until the 1st decade of the 20th century that early radiometric dating suggested even approximately the right range. The actual. value, plus or minus 1%, wasn't determined until the 1950s. And the central organising principle of a study dating back 2,400 years wasn't. finally accepted until 1965, having been proposed in modern form in 1912. That is, it's only 55 of 2,200+ years that geologists have formally had the foggiest notion of how their study actually works.
We've an exceptionally good idea of where earth movements are likely to occur, what landforms are especially vulnerable, and what construction methods most resilient. But precise timing eludes us -- at human scales events are effectively random.
Economics prides itself on its reliance on maths, dating to Alfred Marshall, to which I can only commend this Reddit thread:
Economics, my own course of academic study, remains mired in wishful thinking, false models, self-serving theory, and rejection and suppression of well-grounded alternative or additional concepts. It specifically rejects thermodynamics (Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Ayres, Hall, Keen, and others), evolution (Veblen), complexity (Arthur and others), and limits (John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, Kenneth Boulding, Meadows et al, and others). Even where at leaast some elements of the mainstream have resumed rational behaviour, policy and public discourse frequently have not.
Epistemic progress and ideology are all but incompatible. If not entirely. Until economics entirely rejects ideology it will not progress. Given its foundations in moral philosophy and the inherent self-serving dynamics of wealth -- "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says is power" notes Smith. in one of the shortest and clearest sentences of Wealth of Nations, a book generally given to neither -- this seems a formidable challenge.
Perhaps I am just dim, but I find your comment to be vague enough to be lacking meaning.
The principles of supply and demand are not vague at all, but they have limitations. They are necessary to understand economic behaviour, but rarely in the real world are they sufficient.
I thought his point was great. There's some well-trodden ground in economics. If you learn nothing more but where the alligators are, you're probably going to do a lot better on that trip through the swamp you plan on taking. If nothing else, it tends to elevate the conversation.