this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Economics is basically social psychology with some numbers sprinkled in.
I keep calling it a pseudoscience.
Someone told me that I "don't know what a pseudoscience is" and that I was "using the word wrong."
No. No, I know what it is, and I used it precisely the way I meant it.
Wayyy too many people think classic economic theory is a legitimate field...
To be fair, that's like 150 years old, back when they believed in spontaneous generation, and the idea that continents move was absurd and crazy.
And yet the global economy is still operating on the same basic assumptions...
They've been made even worse by further developments of those basic assumptions as expounded by neoliberalism and reaganomics, but the underlying premises are still the same.
The global economy is definitely not being run by economists or anything particularly close to prescribed economic principles. Most countries are being run by some combination of authoritarian and/or populist governments whose economic policy is crafted to benefit either a small ruling class, or to win elections (voted on largely by people who don’t understand economics).
The most obvious example of this is the United States, which is the single largest national economy, and which keeps instituting tariffs despite “tariffs = almost always bad” being one of the first and most foundational tenets of macro econ.
The global economy is being run by capitalist oligarchs, whose central premises for existing are based on classical economic theories (private ownership of capital, extraction of resources, and exploitation of labor), their operational strategies are based on classical economic theories (infinite pursuit of growth at all costs, externalizing risks while internalizing profits, quarterly profit margins being the sole indicator of growth, cutting costs to minimize expenses and manufacturing scarcity to maximize pricing, etc.), and the policies meant to regulate and/or stimulate economic activity are based on classical economic theories (austerity for the poor, supply-side "trickle-down" economics for the rich including tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts).
The tariffs are an exception attributable to the overt buffoonery of an extortionist grifter running the show. It doesn't negate all the other examples of how classical economic theory is destroying society and the planet.
It's definitely just Maths with feelings sprinkled on top.
If you read a book by any investor they'll talk about the irrationality of the market. They'll say how daytrading should be mathematically impossible, but admit how some people do profit a lot from it.
I wouldn't call it pseudoscience, because it's like mixing maths with psychology.
It's a soft science at best, but some people try to treat it like it's a hard science.
I still hold that it displays characteristics of pseudoscience by operating on unsound premises and unverifiable assumptions though
Don't forget gambling.
... And wishful thinking!
So..... religion
No joke: Economists do kind of fulfill the role of priests in that they explain the "necessary [fake] world order" to the masses.
Saying "Capitalism is a bad system" gets you comparable comments from economists as "Gods don't exist" gets you from priests in a religious society. Both comments also get cops on your ass as well (depending on where you live).
Because economist and even business leaders don't actually have any control over the economy. They try to predict it and make changes, but they have no real power as was shown by COVID and the Ukraine war.
No, surely all will be good if we invest in so-called "AI", war and the distopian surveillance state. /s
They don't even disguise it, praxeology is effectively theology without the metaphysics.
I struggle to consider it scientific because it bakes in so many fundamental assumptions without questioning them. At least mainstream economics.
Ah, uh, it's a xkcd. Expanded by a reddit user, forever ago.
Philosophy is in entirely the wrong place for some reason. Should be slightly to the right of maths.
For this reason it seems closer to religion for me
Don't all scientific fields rest on fundamental assumptions? I mean, just to pull an example at random, astronomers were hung up on the geocentric model of the universe for a long time before we came up with the heliocentric model, which in turn was ditched for the "no true frame of reference" model we now use. Having flawed assumptions doesn't make it non-scientific, just incorrect.
If making unproven assumptions is problematic then physics is in some real deep shit.
I mean, yeah. We don't have a unified theory of quantum gravity because at least one of our assumptions is off. Science is just figuring out precisely which assumptions are wrong and how wrong they are.
What makes a difference is how models are evaluated in light of new evidence. If a model makes predictions that turn out to be incorrect, then a big part of scientific progress is in re-examining the underlying assumptions of the model.
My beef with economics isn't that it's often wrong, but that economists are often keen to present themselves as scientists to boost their epistemic authority, whilst also acting in a deeply unscientific way.
The worst economists for this get very offended if you say that economics is a soft science, with more in common with psychology than physics. This offends them because they hear "soft science" as a pejorative. Economics absolutely is a science, but the more that economists try to pretend that their object of study isn't wibbly wobbly as hell, the less I respect them.