I went into a nat science major because animals are cool, and end up being a bunch of statistics and unfun math. I want my money back.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Bro, hear me out, what if I buy some of your company, bro, and you buy some of my company, and then we, like, keep buying and selling slices of our own companies back and forth to each other?
Bro we're gonna generate so much economy from this. We're gonna generate trillions in value, bro, just trading back and forth.
... wait... product? What product?
Economics brings the spherical cow issue to its logical extreme with “efficient markets”
Economics is just statistics but they ignore half the data that goes into it. It's homeopathic statistics.
"Economics is basically math" is one of the greatest PR stunts that anybody ever pulled. Mainstream economics is pseudoscience sprinkled with some maths so people take it more seriously, it has barely any more predictive power than palm reading.
Economics is a funny one as ultimately it's a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many) that people often incorrectly lump in with maths.
Kinda tough for an academic to run meaningful experiments on an actual economy though beyond models and simulation. And as anyone who has watched a Gary Stevenson video or two will know, your average academic economist is pretty bad at models and simulations.
Though I guess even bad experiments are still experiments
Edit: typo
Gary Stevenson is also an overconfident blow hard who thinks because he made money on the stock market he knows more than everyone. I'm a psychologist not an economist, I don't like economics, but this is all still wildly off base from what actually happens in academia. Economist don't run randomized control trial (RCT) style experiments. They use completely different techniques with different statistical methods to test assumptions. Are these as high quality for causal reasoning as a RCT study? No absolutely not. However I think the average person would be shocked at how much of every field of science does not confirm their studies to that gold standard and how difficult it is to match that exact specific scenario statistically.
Most of them are pretty bad at anthro too tbh lol
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...
I struggle to consider it scientific because it bakes in so many fundamental assumptions without questioning them. At least mainstream economics.
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.
Ah, uh, it's a xkcd. Expanded by a reddit user.
For this reason it seems closer to religion for me
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
The question I always tend to have, when the subject of if economics is or isn't a science comes up is: given that economies and trade are clearly things that exist (to the extent that any sort of human social interaction exists anyway), and that have measurable properties, it at least ought to be theoretically possible to analyze their behavior using the techniques of science. If you don't think economics is a science, then if you were to use science to study those things, what field would you consider that work to belong to?
I believe economics should be a field of magical studies, which should be a field of psychology. Magical studies should also study the placebo effect, memetics, religious studies, somatopsychic and psychosomatic phenomena, faith exercise science, servitorology, parogenetics, and spellcrafting.
Magic is just science without the burden of coherent theories that predict reliable experimental outcomes, which covers a lot more than psychology. I'd say it's more like humanity spitballing science-ish ideas and seeing which ones pan out, than any one branch of science specifically.
Economics is scientific. Someone could argue that many aspects of neoclassical economics specifically are not scientific, but the study of economic phenomena would remain a scientific endeavor nonetheless.
Depends on the question itself.
I always considered economics, philosophy, theology and law as (important) academic subjects which are not sciences.
A PhD is a doctor of philosophy.
Indeed. But the sense of these words changed since they were adopted. Originally they just meant “teacher of general studies”.
I like to think that they evolved in parallel, as Philosophy underpins all interpretations.
I've tried explaining this to people, and they just don't get it. They say philosophy is just some pointless, meaningless, armchair activity. I tell them, "All fields of study are a subdiscipline of philosophy" and they call me a misinformed idiot.
Like, dude, whatever you study, the field itself wouldn't exist if it wasn't firet developed by philosophers upon a philosophical foundation that was in turn developed by generations of philosophers.
The history of philosophy is the history of human ideas and of humanity itself. All of the sciences, both hard and soft, are simply highly specialized fields of philosophy.
In real life the tax return shows you the best math, or you are fucked.