Is economics a real science?

[teo123]

I posted this on another forum, and I will post here as well, to see what you guys think:

Well, I am an anarcho-capitalist, but I fail to see how you can compare economics to physics. In my opinion, the only social science worthy of the name is linguistics. There have been a few linguistic predictions that turned out to be remarkably correct, like the De Saussure's prediction of laryngeal consonants in early Indo-European languages coloring the vowels. It can perhaps be compared to the predictions about the cosmic background radiation made by the Big Bang Theory. But I don't see anything like that happening in the field of economics. Economists almost never predict recessions. They are usually talking fairy-tales of eternal economic growth, and when they prove false, they search for some post-hoc explanation of how a recession could happen and can't seem to agree on it. Sorry, but that's not science. A common misconception is that economists had long warned about the inevitable collapse of communism. That's just not what was going on: economists at the time generally believed communism and capitalism to be about as viable.

And a lot of things I've seen from economics are obvious pseudoscience. The Austrian School of Economics obviously contradicts the basic game theory, you don't need to be a mathematician or a computer scientists to understand how. The "economic calculation problem" is also hard, if not impossible, to make compatible with the basic computer science. Now, I assume not all economics is like that, but much of it obviously is. A lot of things in mainstream economics come from the Austrian School of Economics.

Many people are using economics to argue for government. Well, I think that, in any economic argument for the existence of government, there are two hidden premises. The first one is that, if we have a government, it's actually going to follow scientific economic policies. Which is obviously false. Nearly no economist advocates tariffs or rent ceilings, yet nearly all countries have those things. And the second premise is that economics is a reliable science, reliable enough to justify economic policies that require taking away peoples liberties. And I fail to see why that would be the case.

[TelepathyConspiracy]

Explain why Walmart is not a vending machine?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=76AFNIxYjUE

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T6lxjx4ZzBM