Thank you for replying in such a constructive way, and I apologize for being uncouth in my previous comments. You've made your original point: I've admitted that, as a critic of economic science, I'm speaking from gross ignorance.

I want to be clear, I don't object to the study of economics, it's obviously an important and valuable field of study. What I object to is the (IMO) unearned social/political status of the field. I don't believe that economics is science (yet!) and so it seems to me that it functions (en mass) as a kind of psychological blind or bluff to let us feel like we have more agency than we in fact do. If I were to try to put it in a pithy "clickbait" phrase, "Alan Greenspan is a priest not an engineer." Hmm?

I don't think I'm going to convince you that economics is pre-scientific, and you're not going to convince me that it's a proper science. But let me try to be a little bit constructive. To me a legit scientific economics would have to be essentially:

Ecology + Psychology

Ecology is scientific (because it studies physical systems and our physics is solid. It deals in vastly complex networks but traction is gained through statistical methods, and our understanding of statistics is pretty strong too.)

Psychology, on the other hand, is a huge mess, far worse than economics. I'm not going to get into it here but the only rigorous engineer-able psychology I know of is dismissed as pseudoscience by academics, so there we are.

We're halfway there, viewed optimistically.

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> Can you explain what's wrong with WARP?

I can pick apart the definition and maybe that will illustrate where I'm coming from.

> This axiom states that given incomes and prices, if one product or service is purchased instead of another, then, as consumers, we will always make the same choice. The weak axiom also states that if we buy one particular product, then we will never buy a different product or brand unless it is cheaper, offers increased convenience, or is of better quality (i.e. unless it provides more benefits). As consumers, we will buy what we prefer and our choices will be consistent, so suggests the weak axiom.

To me, this is obviously a statement about psychology, but it's trying to treat the human being as a kind of "black box" by applying an abstraction ("as consumers") that's almost cartoonish, and then reasoning over this abstraction in ways that don't particularly match up to what you see in the real world, where people buy things for all kinds of reasons, most of them largely unconscious. There's the phenomenon where the price of something goes up and people want it more. Or the package changes and the sales go up (or down) even though the other qualities (price, convenience, quality) are the same.

Then there's the methodological difficulties. How do you actually measure these things to test the theories? How are these predictions stated?

To me, WARP says "people have habits" without adding anything of substance. It's taking a commonsense, prosaic truism and dressing it up in a lab coat.

> My point is not to disdain these sources of information, it's that they aren't strictly necessary: preferences exist to predict choices and a given claim about someone's preferences can be falsified by observing their choices.

If you have access to lots of purchasing data then, yes, I'm sure you can find regularities. If you're talking about predicting individual behaviour than again, how are you measuring this stuff? Are people following subjects around and recording them?

I want to be clear, I am pro-science. I'm not trying to undermine the authority of science, I'm trying to protect it. If we restrict the word to mean those fields of study that can make reliable predictions, or in other words that lead to reliable engineering disciplines, then it becomes pretty much unassailable. Only a fool doubts a physicist (in re: physics) eh? Chemistry is already a little squiffy though: e.g. nicotine "research".

If we continue to insist that psychology, sociology, economics, and the other "soft" sciences should carry the same authority when it's obvious to a lot of people that they are nothing like physics, then it seems to me we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm not going to go through those examples you gave, and I apologize for that. The first one sounds like it might be a statistical correlation backed by a lot of data, so perhaps it's okay? The second two sound like numerical naval gazing. Why study poverty? Just give people food and money. The reason poverty exists is that we lack love.

> You blame economists for the loss of the Aral Sea.

In re: the Aral sea. I do not blame the economists, or even the Soviets per se, I blame human nature. We are dumb, ignorant, and prone to hallucinations. That's why science is so important. These folks thought they had a correct economic theory but they were wrong and they didn't have the ability to notice and react. We (modern, Western) folks tend to talk and act like we have a correct economic theory but then things like the 2008 meltdown come along and Alan Greenspan is like, "Whoops."

To the extent that economics helps us see and understand reality, it's terrific! To the extent that it helps us fool ourselves, it's as dangerous as relying on astrologers.