Which is more scientific, economics or sociology?

3 Responses to Which is more scientific, economics or sociology?

1. Prof Frink says:

   April 10, 2009 at 6:57 am

   The author seems impressed that very conservative people “know better”. Hah! There’s a reason why economics is referred to as the dismal science.
2. Roger Hallman says:

   April 10, 2009 at 9:32 am

   I have a minimal education in economics but almost no education in sociology–save for a semester course in high school more than a decade ago. Suffice it to say that I’ve never done any research in either. But the question of which is more “scientific” seems to me to be a question of methodology. Simply, how strictly does the research done in these fields adhere to the scientific method? Are the results repeatable?

   Sadly, what I remember of my education in both fields, we didn’t actually do any science. (But you never actually *do* science in lecture; that’s what the labs are for. Perhaps we need social science labs to compliment the lecture portion of the class, just as we do with the physical sciences…)
3. Chris says:

   April 10, 2009 at 12:27 pm

   A few observations:

   1. The extreme political categories have so few people in them that any results derived from them should be viewed cautiously.

   2. Among “very liberal” respondents, there seemed to be no difference between the number who said either field was “very scientific” – the difference arises entirely from the “pretty scientific” category.

   3. If “very scientific” and “pretty scientific” are considered together, majorities of people of all political leanings agreed that economics is scientific. All but the two most conservative categories agreed that sociology is very or pretty scientific (and those are close). Variation across the political spectrum is, overall, minor (compare one of the same blogger’s recent posts on attitudes toward gay marriage vs. political attitudes in whites) and the data look rather noisy.

   4. The (extremely conservative, if recent posts and blogroll are any evidence) blogger linked to did not consider the above points nor perform any kind of significance test before crowing about the (presumed) importance of the difference. This, IMO, says a lot about how scientific that person’s interpretation of statistics is (but of course not much about conservatives in general).

   5. Finally and most obviously, while I’m not that familiar with the current state of the art in sociology, economics’s track record as a science isn’t looking so great right now. There’s a lot of economic pseudoscience flying around, some of it coming from heavily credentialed economists – which indicates that their pseudoscientific leanings didn’t stop them from *accumulating* those credentials. That’s a sad comment on the state of the field that you just don’t see in, say, biology. (I wonder how scientific extreme conservatives think biology is…) So I certainly wouldn’t say that economics is “very scientific” (with all due respect to those economists who are trying to make it so).

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