Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Economists do scientific research because their methods are scientific (unlike alchemists' methods*).
Alchemists employed formalism, observation and experiment--the three methods of scientific inquiry. What they did not do was produce testable predictions that hold up under scrutiny; electing instead to issue either blatantly incorrect forecasts or more often incomprehensibly qualified handwaving.

The scientific results are statements about probabilities, not about exact outcomes (even physics ceased in to claim that it can do more in many cases).
Natural scientists were deploying probability to the problems of fluids, thermodynamics and the subatomic when economists and social "scientists" were still hemming and hawing dialectics. What you have today is the sorry marriage between statisticians feeding results to mumblers squinting to something real in the numbers. It's slightly more elegant numerology.

These probabilities can be tested and be falsified if wrong.
1. Outside of a very few narrow areas, they can't. There's no laboratory to achieve the repetition necessary generate the sample space. The inspiring signal is of limited value beyond backcasting and useless in generating new, testable predictions.

2. Even if 1) weren't the case, I'd love to see a SINGLE, verified economic forecast pegged within the 95 percent confidence interval that doesn't sweep the range of mutually exclusive possibilities with near uniform probability. Seriously, we ask less of meteorologists.

And there's your challenge, Fuchs. Simply point me to 2) and you will have demonstrated economics has at least produced a single scientific result.