Lots of floundering and empty condescension there.
Economics is a social science, at best, but you’re comparing economics to physics. That’s asinine for all the obvious reasons. “Social science” is a euphemism. They used to call themselves “social studies.” You don’t study society or people as such with the same rigor with which you’d study nature. The experimental controls are very different (because people have rights), so the epistemic status of the models is too.
Your talk of a “grand unified theory” is a red herring, since what you’ve missed is the difference between a model and a theory. Sure, there are lots of competing models in the sciences. But a theory is a model that’s passed a great many tests so that its precepts count as natural (descriptive) laws. As I pointed out in an earlier article on economics (link below), late modern economics is swimming in models, yet it lacks not just a unified theory of everything but a real scientific theory of how economies work.
What’s the dominant theory in economics today? I’m not talking about the mathematical apparatus, or the tools which of course aren’t falsifiable since they don’t consist of empirical statements. (And of course, the math can be adjusted to account for new models. Math can always be adjusted, just like any tool.) Biology has the theory of natural selection. Physics has the standard model of particles, and general relativity. Cosmology has the big bang theory.
What’s the equivalent in economics, in a nutshell? What is the nature of economics, according to the dominant theory in the field?
I’ll just stop there and let you answer.
