Is Economics a Pseudo-Science?

[minionofmidas]

Absolutely. Basically a cross between Sociology, satanist Divinity, and quite complicated maths that just happens to have little or nothing to do with what it's supposed to prove (actually, sociology does that as well).

Economist thought can help to understand why a certain government scheme doesn't work as expected, but beyond that, it's fairly pointless.

[minionofmidas]

Unfortunately, macroeconomics is no such thing.

Economics is a study of probable economic behavior.

[minionofmidas]

It depends on the version of economics espoused.

Classical/Keynesian economics are scientific, and so is Monetarism, since they all draw conclusions, which can be described mathematically, only from observations of transactions of actual human beings.

Neither Marxism and Austrian School "economics" are scientific, since they both depend on deductive reasoning from arbitrarily defined premises, the utter antithesis of a science.

Eh... where is that different from all the classical stuff? The saving grace of the Austrians is that they were at least aware of what they're doing.

[minionofmidas]

I think in order to properly answer this I'd need your definitions of what qualifies something as a 'psuedo-science' (and indeed a 'science', I suppose).

Ah, admittedly.

[minionofmidas]

The true test is, "what happens after these theories have been falsified?" At least, that's the test I applied when consigning economics to the realm of the non-scientific. Same would go for the Freudians.