As Brad de LOng says he can not take a thousand different countires with the same population, the sam eindustries and indtroduce different level of M1, bonds, fiat, corporate incentives and see the different outcomes.
We , in physics do this all the time...and when we ahve aquestgion there is always someone with the money and will to try again and agian.. The only problem wiht "physics" is the "fashion" problem.. if something is not fashionable it might not be repeated and some questiosn remain unanswered... but this is, ina sense, good.. if it is not interesting to everybody we do not bother..
The cosnensus -building in physics has ntohing to do wiht the consensus-building in hisotry and economy...
Economy has a fuandametnal intrinsic problem (they can not repeat experiments) and an extrinsic problem (incentives lead to economists which do not know anyhting about models, algebra and self-constrain) which has lead to an "economic" social science which has absurd starting hypothesis.
A pleasure I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude
Most economists I have read use the algebra I learnt in my first course in phsyics. Pathetic.
I respect those making econometrics, since they know what they are doing and know the algebra necessary to present their data. It is probably the most impresive part of eocnomics. It reminds me of the ethnologists going to a foreign land to really get soem data bout human behvior.
And then you have a huge chunk of economists which do not look for data ina systematic way because all the y want is to poof a particular "way of looking at things". Generally , the models have a set of stupid hyopthesis, which are never true in real life. They also use extremlly low level algebra..and soemtimes they use it worng...
This is why I prefer, beside econometrics, those economsits that know what they are doing. They know that at the end of the day they are doing history with a bit of algebra (De Long, Krugman...) while playing the games of the other eocnomists trying to find an stupid model with stupid hyopthesis which could describe their historical insights using a more complex non-relistic model. And this is an statement (or simialr) that I have read again and again done by the economists I like more...
As I noted in an earlier comment, the large and growing academic fields of history of science and philosophy of science indicate that there may be more in common between social and natural sciences regarding consensus building than you're willing to admit.
But, as I also indicated in another comment upthread, the idea of applying the methods or discoveries of physical science to the social problem is mistaken. Physicists and economists are interested in fundamentally different questions, which is something that too many economists today with "physics envy" for unnecessary appeals to calculus for argument should consider. Physicists want to know how the physical world works, or at root, "Did God have a choice?" Economists, however, are interested in social questions -- questions of how human beings relate to each other. Issues of justice, power, and well-being are concepts for which the mental frameworks of physics have little bearing, and vice versa, even though there are notable crossovers at times (Darwin's theories of natural and sexual selection came from his readings of Adam Smith and other classical economists, for example, and Newton's writings on the nature of money were influential in the formative years of economics).
Some physicists, that it.
Most published physics is materials science, nothing to do with metaphysical wankery. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buiter
Did they?... I thought they had more to do with his grandfather... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
In physics, as in any sect group, we work along consensus building , as much as in any other place. The key point is that we can always device an experiment... or can always try to device an experiment to convince someone else.
In economics this is not possible. Whenever you want to argue if Keynessian politics are ok now, you can not make hundreds of experimetns.. youonly can try to understand the past and make some guesses.
Unfortunately, a lot of economists take themselves too seriously and think they are above thsoe limitations. Theya re not, and most economists textbooks apresent at least a couple of crazy assumptions which ina lot of cases are known to be wrong if youlearn enough about anthropology or development pshychology.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of physics also do (don't you know we are looking for the "theory of everythign"? cracking), the difference is that after we built the atomic bomb we are not that interesting anymore. We do not have the media power/projection and incentive structure that economists do to go around and proclaim they know everyhting because they do some basic algebra.
That's why I wil alwasy trust more a DeLong analysis that a Summers analysis.
