Is science more important than economics?

[social econ]

Hello,

How important is science? How important is economics? Which one is more capable of dealing with climate change? What do you think and what do other people think?

We are researchers from the University of Otago’s Centre for Science Communication in New Zealand, and we are working to understand how practicing scientists with Masters or PhD degrees judge the relative importance of science and economics in solving major challenges such as climate change, food security, health, natural resource management, and environmental protection. 

We will be running a survey and we hope that you might fill it in. The survey should take no more than 15 minutes, is voluntary, anonymous, and has ethics approval from the University of Otago. The survey will be open until the 30^th of September.

The Survey is now open and available here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/L2FB6WP

Yours, with thanks,

Fabien Medvecky

PhD University of Sydney

Vicki Macknight

PhD University of Melbourne

[Nathan McCorkle]

Isn't economics a form of science?

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-Nathan

[drllau]

> Isn't economics a form of science? 

nope ... economics can be summed up in one sentence "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch". You are talking about what motivates people to create goods/services, to trade, and the various policies that result. If you can reduce people's behaviour down to equations, then you are oversimplifying homo rationalis. Climate change is another issues ... science creates simplified models of reality, and this is bounded by the lack of calibration data, resolution contrained by computer speed, and the limits of understanding nature. Where models have been verified by historical data, projecting them forwards have risks in lack of understanding of feedback loops. 

On the other hand, humans react very well to perceived or actual losses, as the incumbant energy companies protest carbon taxes, object to regulations which internalise social costs (eg acid rain) and point to all the stranded assets (shut in oil wells). What is harder to do is to champion the sunrise industries of greentech, the benefits of haze-free skies (which is not reflected in share prices) or paying the human cost of displaced refugees from rising seas.

[Cathal Garvey]

*Good* economics should be done based on evidence, tiny P-values, and
rational comparisons or even control groups where possible. So "Good"
economics is scientific.

Bad economics is done on large, buggy excel tables and leads to stupid,
evidentially unsupportable outcomes like austerity which are
doubled-down on for the sake of reputation. This, like bad science, is
not science at all.

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[Matt Lawes]

And most economists are not scientists but rather political ideologues. For example the "keynesians" or the "Frankfurt school" etc. Krugman is perhaps the most modern example of this. Data is selected to support the ideological theory.
Since most economics cannot support a null hypothesis driven analysis, most economics is not science. Science without a null hypothesis is similarly bad science.
>matt

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[Bryan Jones]

Scientifically "good" economics may be based on tiny p-values and control groups, but more often than not that would be morally bad economics. As is sometimes the case in the hard sciences, doing robust experiments on people often means hurting people, or at least knowingly putting people in harms way. You might get better data, but as a society we've decided that that is not ethical. This leaves empirical economists with only accidental experiments and generally poor quality data sets to try to draw inferences from.

[Cathal (Phone)]

This class of ethics is very well trodden territory thanks to medical ethics...

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