It's 80% ideology + 20% math used to prove their point based on ideological assumptions.
Which is also why economics and economists managed to ever make 0 predictions for anything more complicated than the most basic of models, and have failed time and again to predict real world outcomes.
And then they get in bed with power, as advisors, ministers, etc -- talk about the worse case of "conflict of interest" compared to any other scientific field.
Well, maybe except doctors in the 70s working for the tobacco industry.
(That is, your statement presupposes most people of the field are either idiots, fanatics or crooks.)
I'd be interested if you can back that up? (With non ideological sources, of course.)
Edit: Considering the numbers, there are going to be some true conspiracy theories... and mass hypnosis from unverifiable things like psychology (Freud, Jung, etc). The burden of proof is still on the one presenting the conspiracy theories.
Edit 2: And of course, some sciences are experimental and use the scientific method. Some are largely historical (palaeontology, economics, etc). That doesn't counter my point either.
Kind of like there have been hundreds of thousands of Freudian psychoanalysts (considered scientists) in the 20th century until now?
Or how people consider (and increasingly clinics embrace) homeopathists as doctors and scientists? With their own educational programs, journals and everything too.
In any case there's nothing special about many people working in a field that makes them automatically proper scientists.
To begin with, the term "science" is ambiguous.
It can refer to empirically or axiomatically verifiable, experimental, scientific-method following fields, which is what is actually "science" (e.g. physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, etc.) and whatever ad-hoc field of study one can come up with.
The first is sometimes called "hard sciences" to differentiate them from the more "lax" and "anything goes" ones.
Now, the second type could still be a productive (if informal) field of inquiry and argumentation and insight. I'm all for continental philosophy for example.
But it's not scientific in the way engineering or physics is. Not even close.
The "Academy of Science" in most countries includes philosophers for example. And they do get Ph.D degrees and everything. They never verify anything, and they can hold totally conflicting views and still be "valid" and well established. Would you consider them "scientists"?
If not, are you a conspiracy theorist?
It's naive to believe that the way a society names some practices is also revealing about the essence of those practices.
That some sciences can't use the scientific method (do experiments etc) like some parts of geology, don't counter my point. [Edit: Unless your point really is that you dismiss palaeontology et al in an equal way, too?]
(Or are you arguing that 80% of most everything which aren't based on mathematical proofs are bad?)
Edit: This is an innocent question about getting references to strong claims that a science has 0 "scientific content". I know some people whose integrity and intelligence I trust, which later went the academic track in economics. That gave in total 4 down votes -- but still without a reference?
His statement, when you refine it appropriately (which is not always done in an online forum), only presupposes that most people of the field who are visible to the public are "either idiots, fanatics or crooks".
I wouldn't phrase it quite so strongly (and for what it's worth, the grandparent didn't either), but it's easy to see why that would happen. Since economics is mostly about money, even slightly bending the public's perception on what scientific economic consensus is can have an extreme payoff via influencing public policy. So a lot of money is spent on trying to do so (virtually all of the so-called "think tanks"), much more and on a much more consistent basis than in any other science. So even from first principles, without any evidence, you have to logically expect economics to be worse than other sciences at delivering a rational truth.
As for evidence, I wonder what you would even accept as a "non-ideological source"?
All that said, it's not like the economics profession is an entirely lost cause. There are people like Dean Baker and James Galbraith who manage to occasionally bring alternative voices to the public.
Since no references, which I asked for, have been presented at all, that is not an interesting problem...
>> the grandparent didn't [phrase it strongly] either
Uh, "scientific content in most economists is zero." is not strong?
>> All that said, it's not like the economics profession is an entirely lost cause. There are people like Dean Baker and James Galbraith who manage to occasionally bring alternative voices to the public.
Why do you assume that "alternative voices" are better than the research consensus of a field?
(Yes, I make myself intentionally stupid here. I realize the answer probably is because you like the alternative voices better...? :-) )
>> Since economics is mostly about money, even slightly bending the public's perception on what scientific economic consensus is can have an extreme payoff via influencing public policy.
Certainly you'll find paid research in any field with policy influences. Smoking comes to mind. Please make it likely that most of the [economy] field is corrupt, as the GP argued?
I think present-day economics is at the point where the science of history was at the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century, i.e. most of them still believe that they somehow can predict the future based on past economic events, the same as some historians believed they they could predict our future based on past events from our history. Popper (among others) proved in his "The Poverty of Historicism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poverty_of_Historicism) why "scientific prediction" is a futile thing.
What economics tries to bring new to the table is math (or what they consider as math), apparently that should make us laymen believe that what they're doing is more than crystal-ball guessing.
outside of hard sciences its difficult for even some in the field to know what is and and what isn't at times, the chance for the layman is near zero. hence when I tend to dismiss anything backed with politician ranting
