There are two questions here. One is whether economists have a good influence on policy. Another is whether they even understand anything. I don’t have any illusions about the first question, but my interest is in understanding.
We observe that prices tend to go up, and wish to quantify that observation, maybe to test ideas about its relationship to money supply. So we have to operationalize “prices go up.” We do it by sampling commonly purchased things and keeping track of their prices over time. That seems to me to be as innocuous as operationalizations come in social science. If you don’t think we learn anything by doing it, I don’t see how you think we can learn anything about human affairs at all.
The crucial practical problem here is that attempts to tackle scientifically issues that are relevant for politics, power, and ideology are more likely to lead to the emergence of ideologically-driven pseudoscience than to a real scientific clarification of contentions issues.
That’s a problem for all domains of knowledge including the hard sciences.
There are two questions here. One is whether economists have a good influence on policy. Another is whether they even understand anything. I don’t have any illusions about the first question, but my interest is in understanding.
We observe that prices tend to go up, and wish to quantify that observation, maybe to test ideas about its relationship to money supply. So we have to operationalize “prices go up.” We do it by sampling commonly purchased things and keeping track of their prices over time. That seems to me to be as innocuous as operationalizations come in social science. If you don’t think we learn anything by doing it, I don’t see how you think we can learn anything about human affairs at all.
That’s a problem for all domains of knowledge including the hard sciences.