tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34480619.post9007638167148310644..comments2024-03-11T13:47:03.621-05:00Comments on Physics and Physicists: Economics Is As Much A Science As Physics?ZapperZhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15861398273820851809noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34480619.post-25346714857870075702009-12-28T06:22:54.200-06:002009-12-28T06:22:54.200-06:00Philosophy is about as interesting as a sack of we...Philosophy is about as interesting as a sack of wet noodles, and about as useful as a blown out tire.<br /><br />Quantum Mechanics, The Standard Model, and Relativity stand alongside Evolution as the most tested scientific theories of all time. So to claim that physics makes no predictions is outright false.Gordonhttp://www.aitj-co.com/gcsgz5/blognoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34480619.post-21932548486581732242009-12-27T22:07:07.887-06:002009-12-27T22:07:07.887-06:00The economist pissed me off. Physics is the first ...The economist pissed me off. Physics is the first discipline that developed as a science. Chemistry, Biology, Psychology..came later. The scientific methodology we have today is to a large extent shaped by developments in physics.<br />Economics is just a wannbe physics.fellyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17259462593002235166noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34480619.post-29853950995840671842009-12-25T08:42:46.313-06:002009-12-25T08:42:46.313-06:00I once argued with an economist who claimed his fi...I once argued with an economist who claimed his field could make accurate forecasts of economic trends, climates, catastrophes, and so forth. I asked him to provide some examples. He said "What do you mean, examples?" <br /><br />I said "You know: documented instances where economic theory predicted something important about the economy." <br /><br />"Huh? I don't have anything like that."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34480619.post-68785267752598661842009-12-24T13:20:05.409-06:002009-12-24T13:20:05.409-06:00This quote from Nelson Goodman to some extent invo...This quote from Nelson Goodman to some extent invokes Otto Neurath's "In some cases a physicist is a worse prophet than a [behaviourist psychologist], as when he is supposed to specify where in Saint Stephen's Square a thousand dollar bill swept away by the wind will land, whereas a [behaviourist] can specify the result of a conditioning experiment rather accurately" (originally 1933, "United Science and Psychology"; this is as cited on page 27 of Nancy Cartwright's "The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science", which is a book that I suppose would make you cross). This is a relatively famous example in Philosophy of Science. The substitution of a leaf for a thousand dollar bill makes it rather sadly less visceral.<br /><br />Applied to your counter-example, Neurath challenges Physicists to predict <i>precisely</i> when a <i>particular</i> individual electronic gadget will break, whether because of a cosmic ray or because of being dropped. Classical physics never tried to do this, at least since Poincar\'e, although noting the ambition of <a rel="nofollow">Laplace's demon</a>, because of an inability to determine initial conditions with sufficient accuracy, and modern physics does not try to do this because of the irreducible indeterminism of quantum theory.<br /><br />The statistics of when individuals in an ensemble of gadgets will break are accessible to description and prediction by physics (we could, for example, estimate how often background radiation or other physics would affect a given type of gadget, and the chance that the consequences would be terminal), but the statistics of economic events could perhaps be claimed to be as accessible to description and prediction by economics.<br /><br />There are, as you say, questions of whether economics can give a causal explanation of anything, however in the age of quantum theory it is moderately tendentious to claim that physics gives a causal explanation.<br /><br />A generous reading of the Goodman quote might suppose that Goodman would only make such a claim when arguing at a level of extreme, non-numeric abstraction. I was going to write that economics cannot make many predictions to 10 significant figures, but looked at the display of the US national debt at, for example, http://www.usdebtclock.org/, which claims a spurious 14 digit accuracy. The causes for the steady increase of the national debt are documented in various ways (but I can imagine all sorts of ways in which this example might be ripped apart as not at all as satisfying as the sort of causal explanation that quantum theory gives).Peterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08654675777726560464noreply@blogger.com