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.
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
