@ Bugger (the Panda)

@Bugger (the Panda)

Unfortunately that is not true in two ways:

First, economics is not a science in any sense of the word. It is a tribute to the success of the plutocrats that they have positioned the profession as if it were and that is because they wished to borrow the legitimacy of the hard sciences. But it does not use the scientific method in fact: only in seeming, because of its fancy dancing with mathematical models, predicated on utterly false basic assumptions and built on them. If you start with a hidden assumption that the moon is made of green cheese then any house of cards erected on that foundation may be perfectly logical: but house will fall.

Economics is, at best, a social science: but the word "social" in that phrase functions in exactly the same ways as the word "decoy" functions in the phrase "decoy duck". It indicates that the subject is not a science, as decoy indicates the subject is not a duck

The other way you are wrong is that the diversity which characterises a true academic discipline (at least ideally) is wholly absent from economics by now. If one does not buy the neoclassical model as a fundamental truth one is very unlikely to get a job or to have your work published. This is widely recognised and is the foundation for the big protests from economics students we have seen since the crash: they have realised that the profession is corrupted beyond repair. Those heterodox economists who do not believe the nonsense coming out of the professionals mouths are treated like folk who have invented a perpetual motion machine. It is right to treat perpetual motion machine inventors as outside of physics: because the laws of thermodynamics are well tested and are as near to certainties as it gets. Can you say the same of any proposition in mainstream economics? I don't think so. So it is not a legitimate way to proceed because it is false

Mr Brown bought this guff. The whole mantra of "evidence based" policy is founded not on evidence but on testimonials from people whose terminal cancer was cured by snake oil

Economics needs to go away and find some content for their discipline: quietly. But they won't. And that is because we all agreed that they are an academic profession rather than the useful idiots of the plutocrats they undoubtedly are; we all agreed that policy should be based on evidence, ideally: and accepted that they had some; the powers that be, both the idiots like Brown and the cynical like Osborne, promoted this rubbish for their different reasons and gave the economists a lot of influence; and astonishingly, when the real world demonstrated they had no expertise whatsoever, the politicians took the blame and the economists were for the most part unchallenged on their failings (just like the bankers).