by If the social sciences are useless, why do we study them? The thing about social science is that it hasn’t produced much. We social scientists don’t have an inferiority complex; we really are inferior. Physics has produced locomotives, semiconductors, and the atomic bomb. Chemistry has produced amazing new materials. Biology has produced the coronavirus vaccine, and lots more. Social science has produced . . . what, exactly? A method of evaluating redistricting plans? Better polling? The Big Five? The Implicit Association Test? A better auction rule? Some cool marketing tricks? The past two hundred years of social science have given us nothing as useful and important as what gets produced every day in biology, chemistry, and physics. But then the
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Economics
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If the social sciences are useless, why do we study them?
The thing about social science is that it hasn’t produced much. We social scientists don’t have an inferiority complex; we really are inferior. Physics has produced locomotives, semiconductors, and the atomic bomb. Chemistry has produced amazing new materials. Biology has produced the coronavirus vaccine, and lots more. Social science has produced . . . what, exactly? A method of evaluating redistricting plans? Better polling? The Big Five? The Implicit Association Test? A better auction rule? Some cool marketing tricks? The past two hundred years of social science have given us nothing as useful and important as what gets produced every day in biology, chemistry, and physics.
But then the question arises: What’s the point of social science? Why do we do it at all?
Here’s my answer. We study the natural sciences because they help us understand the natural world and they also solve problems, from vaccines to the building of bridges to more efficient food production. We study the social sciences because they help us understand the social world and because, whatever we do, people will engage in social-science reasoning.
Well, maybe Gelman is right when it comes to social science in general, but focusing on that part of social science called economics, I find it extremely hard to see how modelling society assuming things like ‘rational expectations’, ‘representative agents’, calculable uncertainties, ergodicity, ‘common knowledge’, etc., etc., can really “help us understand the social world” …
Economics may be an informative tool for research. But if its practitioners do not investigate and make an effort of providing a justification for the credibility of the (often absurdly bizarre and unreal) assumptions on which they erect their building, it will not fullfill its task. There is a gap between its aspirations and its accomplishments, and without more supportive evidence to substantiate its claims, critics like yours truly will continue to consider its ultimate arguments as a mixture of rather unhelpful metaphors and metaphysics where the marginal return on its ever higher technical sophistication in no way makes up for the lack of serious under-labouring of its deeper philosophical and methodological foundations.