this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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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.