Free Market Economics is not science because personal feelings should never intrude on scientific conclusions. Apparently, economists didn't get the memo.
This is part 9 of my series about the false religion known as Free Market economics. ... be sure to check out the rest.
Inside the predominant view that accepts economists as scientists is a core belief that their empirical analysis is untainted by bias. Milton Friedman himself said, “Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments.” Real-world experience, however, suggests otherwise. Researchers Anthony Randazzo and Jonathan Haidt took a look at how economists’ personal views can be used to predict their conclusions. They found that economists frequently start with a morally defined idea about how the world should be and then develop models that support those pre-ordained narratives. This cuts both ways. Neoclassical economists tend to share a moral worldview with American conservatives. Those who favor the theories of Lord Keynes tend to be more politically progressive. They conclude, “Collectively, this data shows that economists’ substantive conclusions about the workings of the economy are suspiciously correlated with their moral values.”
This is not how science works, of course. Isaac Newton’s personal feelings about apples or preconceptions about right and wrong didn’t affect his theories on gravity. Science is supposed to be provable, testable, and untouched by morality and ethics. Howard Schwartz points out that even big daddy Adam Smith saw moral philosophy as separate from his economic theorizing, titling his first book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. A chemist or physicist can create a controlled experiment and analyze the results to see if it supports their hypotheses. Economists cannot. An economist doesn’t perform experiments at all. Instead, they make “thought experiments” with whatever data points they happen to have at hand in much the same way that Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine did... you know, famous religious figures.
John Dewey made this same criticism about laissez-faire economics nearly a century ago writing, “the scientific inquirer knows that they constitute science only in connection with the methods by which they are reached. Even when true, they are not science in virtue of their correctness, but by reason of the apparatus which is employed in reaching them.” Contrast this with Milton Friedman’s attitude towards his trade’s fancy mathematical equations. He wrote in The Methodology of Positive Economics that economists didn’t really need to worry too much whether a given model’s assumptions were correct so long as that model’s predictions “seemed” to correlate with what an economist could see in real life. I don't think he was supposed to say that part out loud.
“There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths,” wrote Carl Sagan. Scientific inquiry is relentless. Everything must be examined and proven over and over again. Sagan describes how no seemingly settled matter is ever safe. Even today, hundreds of years later, Isaac Newton’s inverse square law of gravitation is being put to the test. In fact, one of the primary reasons that Albert Einstein’s theory of Special and General Relativity is so important is that it demonstrated how Newtonian physics breaks down at high speed and crushing gravity. One hundred years after that, modern scientists are poking at ways that Einstein’s theories might break down. They are, in fact, encouraged to do so by the scientific community. The opposite is true in the dismal science, economics. Carl Sagan saw the similarity between economics and religion himself when he asked the question, “What rewards are religious skeptics given by the established religions – or, for that matter, social and economic skeptics by the society in which they swim?”
Sounds like Carl Sagan knew what was up.
Let us, make them pay.