I am reminded of this XKCD comic:
Economics would probably between psychology and biology...at least in the estimation of its practitioners. Having spent my undergrad in physics, the concept of a pecking order existing based on purity where people are dedicated to demonstrating that their field is a genuine science with a high degree of rigor and wide-reaching applications is entirely accurate.
The problem is less where economics ranks in this "pecking order" than the fact that this mentality exists at all. How objective and empirical a given field isn't a mark of its prestige or the quality of its practitioners - it's dictated by the kind of phenomena it's trying to understand. Human processes, like economics, sociology and politics, are inherently less predictable and measurable than natural ones. Sociologists and (some) political scientists have the humility to recognize that, but economists have deluded themselves into thinking that they reduce fundamental human activities to a series of models and equations. And what's worse, theoretical economists in particular show little interest in the empirical validity of their models' derivations - in this respect mirroring the worst behaviors of some theoreticians in the "hard" sciences as well.
I entirely agree, and I realize I did not say it outright but it is the truth that a major source of problems in the field of economics is that many economists strive to place as highly in the pecking order as possible. Classical economics divorced from human psychology is deeply flawed as a model of any real economy, yet it is a lot easier to keep practicing accepted older models than it is to actually attempt to do something different. That combined with the politicization of economics (creating a paradigm whereby academics are promoted for reasons unrelated to the quality of their work) has made it a field that has an immense amount of noise and little signal.
