Economics is not a science. Most papers in finance/economics are not repeatable or even applicable in real life - as was displayed when the worlds number one hedgefund started the process of reading published financial papers and trying to apply them [1]
do they use the scientific method? yes. it's science.
is it good science? that's of course a bit subjective, but the trend in looking for clever natural experiments is, IHMO, a good direction. of course there is a long way to get there as you point out, replication, due to confounders and whatnot is still a big issue.
"Economics is generally regarded as a social science, although some critics of the field argue that economics falls short of the definition of a science for a number of reasons, including a lack of testable hypotheses, lack of consensus, and inherent political overtones. Despite these arguments, economics shares the combination of qualitative and quantitative elements common to all social sciences..."
I remember participating in many experimental economics experiments (think behavioral psychology experiments and other such ways to test micro economic theory) that were very reproducible while in College.
>do they use the scientific method? yes. it's science.
"The scientific method is the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation" [1]
But economics does not objectively establish facts, it establishes subjective facts.
Since every "experiment" is conducted in theory or in a simulation at best, and not in the real market - it pretends to investigate reality when in fact all it experiments with is pick-and-choose model of that reality. That picking and choosing is a very subjective process, hence why we can have chicago and marxists economists both claiming each their "scientific" correctness.
Take a look at the papers that just won the nobel prize. Not a single one of them is a repeatable experiment, because such a thing is impossible in real-market economics. The market changes at all times, and is unique at all times. Economics can only be a science if we accept that science does not have to able to produce repeteable experiments, merely the attempt of doing so is enough to qualify as science.
If we didn’t know the rules of chess or go and merely watched the games of various skill levels might we come up with something similar? Eventually we’d get the rules, I think.
But with people and money there are few rules written down and even the goals of the decision makers are as varied as the decision makers themselves. The things used to facilitate trade themselves vary over time and nature.
Probably why Econ theory tends to better characterized as Econ philosophy. It might need/probably has to be studied with something like science but modified to be able to study the phenomena of scarce resource allocation.
I would argue that Marx’s process-based description of the dynamics of Capitalism have proven to be much more valid (e.g., coercive law of competition, declining rate of profit) than those of neoliberal economics. Are either a science? No. They are schools of thought within political economy. Are they useful? Well, I’ve just stated my opinion above. YMMV.
When post-GFC QE was enacted one group of people (Keynesians) said no inflation would occur, and another (right-leaning) group said all sorts of things would happen:
> We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment.
>Really? Because post-GFC there was all sorts of economic experimentation with regards to austerity:
You can't just spam out a number of articles and expect me to read them all and make out your point for you. Please, this is not reddit.
If you have a counterpoint to make to the fact that no economic experiment can be conducted in real time in the market, and also be repeated, then please share it. I'd love to hear it.
From your first source, just as an example.
>we explore the correlations in the data starting from the simplest and gradually building up – in a step-by-step, transparent manner – to multivariate regressions based on various samples of countries for different periods.
So they looked at data from one unique timeperiod in history. This is not a repeatable experiment.
As an academic field, too, I found it to be quite toxic. You can get published in the best Econ journals by merely being the only person with the data. So of course it won’t be reproduced.
That said, it is understandably hard to run economic experiments. No one’s going to stand up a couple countries to then poke around with policy and see what happens. (Though maybe simulations will or have made this sort of thing possible.)
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43889703-the-man-who-sol...