Is Economics a science?

One of the key focus areas of economics is the study of efficiency surrounding production as well as the exchange of goods as the result of the policies and incentives designed to boost efficiency.

Economics has two main categories: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Microeconomics focuses on individual businesses and consumers, while macroeconomics focuses on the aggregate economy.

One of the main arguments made against the classification of economics as a science is the absence of testable hypotheses. Underlying the challenges in the development and testing of an economic hypothesis are the often unseen and almost unlimited variables that play a crucial role in all economic trends.

The argument in opposition to categorizing economics as a science is also based on the fact that it is impossible to perform controlled experiments in laboratories. On the other hand, the field of chemistry allows scientists to test hypotheses and evaluate their results.

Economists instead typically evaluate historical data either by geographic regions or on a nationwide basis. It is this lack of ability to have a controlled environment for testing hypotheses, and the capacity to get rid of outside influences and factors that can affect results that explain why some people don’t agree that economics must be regarded as a science.

But the very same critique that experts are unable to conduct controlled experiments in laboratories could also be extended to the rest of the social sciences. Even some branches of the natural sciences like physics, for instance, still have unproven theories. However, society accepts physics as a branch of science.

The frequency of immeasurable economic variables makes way for competing and often contradictory theories to exist together with no need for one to prove the other as infeasible.

Even though economics continues to use more mathematical and scientific methods to predict and track trends, theories, results, and conflicting models usually hinder economics from having a solid consensus as found in most natural sciences.

But these conflicts and discrepancies are also inherent in all social sciences, and these also call for an element of interpretation seldom found in natural sciences. Economics has qualitative and quantitative elements common to every social science.

At the end of the day, for as long as the social sciences continue to be a class of science, it is safe to say that economics will fit within the class.