Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
I studied economic science for several years at a West German university, focused on macroeconomics, have a degree on it and I know enough economic theories* and papers to know that this stuff is science.
Great, then it should be easy for you to point to a single economic relation or model that produces better forecasts than flipping a coin. Doesn't have to be general; conditional is fine, too.

I knew about how the Euro zone will run into the exact troubles of today before the € was introduced because economic scientists had worked on the necessary theories back in the early 90's (each one for every advantage or disadvantage of monetary unions), because my professors had told me about those theories and because the micro experiment of monetary union in re-unified Germany was already supporting those theories.
Meanwhile the public - including those who disparage(d) economic science - had no clue about it.
At the very least, you should be able to describe the models and datasets you used so we can verify this prediction by backcast. That also would meet the challenge's criteria.

Making more use of economic science would improve policy a lot. (As of today, lawyers are more influential in policy than economists are - and it shows.)
Lawyers are pretty good because they play a game with rules of their own making. Economists don't have that luxury.

Oh, btw, I will tell the physicists that they shall never again call Newtonian Physics "science" because they're only "simple observations", and some guy on the internet meant that this doesn't count as science. Or I won't.
Feel free. Who's going to argue that mechanics isn't founded on some very simple observations defining the time, displacement and mass in a coordinate system? Once your formalism is in place, the actual science is the meaningful relations between these quantities--conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum and derivatives thereof.