Basic foundational “observations” by Economics aren’t based on the Scientific Method.

I wish the Scientific Method didn’t have “Method” in the name because while it is a sensible name it also is misleading.

Science is “method agnostic”, a new promising method may uncover other methods and theories that totally pull the rug out from under old theories and methods that is a necessary and sometimes brutal aspect to scientific progress.

Economics, because it began and is sustained for the most part as a system of methods searching for justification for their continuation, is largely incapable of undergoing these necessary “method resets” that come periodically in any scientific discipline.

Thus no matter if locally good science is being done in economics it is undermined by the uncomfortable need to preserve the survival of the foundatinal contextualizing methods and axioms they invoke implicitly from the truth uncovered, a vice that plagues any human endeavor consciously and subconsciously and not only keeps Economics from being a real science it also largely sucks the oxygen out of the room for actually scientifically rigorous study of these phenomena.

Alchemy is a great analog here to compare Economics too. Alchemists in the pursuit of trying to figure out how to turn things to gold did interact with and in some ways advance chemistry, but alchemy could never divest itself from its own pre-existing beliefs and methods as chemistry discovered more and more of the universe and began to accurately predict more and more of it.

If alchemy was capable discarding old methods to pursue understanding phenomena more lucidly and precisely chemistry would probably be called “alchemy” in english nowadays and alchemy would be called “pseudo-alchemy”.

Economics equates to alchemy they express a desire of a system of methods, axioms and explanations to produce a certain end goal and it forms fatal shackles to the follies of the past.

What definition of pseudoscience would capture economics without capturing medicine, ecology, or meteorology?

Everyone’s just using models here, and the way we incorporate statistical observations to define the limits of the models’ scope, and refine the models over time, or reject the models entirely, applies to economists, meteorologists, seismologists, and many branches of actual human medicine.

Popper would define pseudoscience as predictions that can’t be falsified, but surely that can’t apply to the idea of the weatherman predicting rain and being wrong, right?

Kuhn came along and argued that science is about solving problems within paradigms, and sometimes rejecting paradigms in scientific revolutions (geocentrism vs heliocentrism, Newtonian physics versus Einstein’s relativity), but it wasn’t a particularly robust test for separating out pseudoscience.

Lakatos categorized things further at explaining how model-breaking observations could be handled within the structure of how science performs its work (limiting the scope of the model, expanding the complexity of the model to fit the new observations, proposing specific exception handlers), but also observed the difference between the hard core of a discipline, in which attempts at refutation were not tolerated, and auxiliary hypotheses where the scientists were free to test their ideas for falsifiability.

But when you use these ideas to try to understand how science works, I don’t think economics really stands out as less scientific than cancer research or climatology or other statistically driven scientific disciplines.

The failure rate falls within the tolerances

even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.

No. Gödel’s completeness theorem says that if something is true in every model of a (first-order) theory, it must be provable. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that for every sufficiently powerful theory, there exists statements that are true sometimes, and these can’t be provable.

The key word is “everywhere”.

Worse: If the chosen axioms are contradictory, then the theorem is effectively worthless.

And it is impossible to know whether axioms are consistent. You can only prove that they are not.

But that’s math. And its proof is math. And that proof is true everywhere forever.

I see philosophy as a place to make nonrigorous arguments. Eventually, other fields advance enough to do away with many philosophical arguments, like whether matter is infinitely divisible or whether the physical brain or some metaphysical spirit determines our actions.

Since this is a question that math hasn’t advanced enough to answer, we can have a philosophical argument about whether other fields will eventually advance enough to get rid of all philosophical arguments.

All science is done by humans, and so biases are inevitable. Climate science, and a few other fields like medicine, have big enough vested interests that this needs to be accounted for. The physical scientists think they are safe, but one day a mathematician will discover Polymarket and then they’ll understand why climate science journals have a ‘conflict of interest’ section.

I’m mainly talking about the endless fights at the IPCC, where every word and sentence is a debate, but yes, it really isn’t.