Einstein's down on the beach staring into the sand, 'cause everything he believes in is shattered

In theory, I am a scientist (that's actually a pun, if you think about it). As some may have noticed, I tend to delve frequently into politics. Now, these two fields are certainly not totally distinct, given that the vast majority of science funding comes from the government via science agencies like NASA, NSF, and NIH and certain departments of the government, Defense and Energy being the primary ones for physicists. Suffice it to say, one need not follow politics too closely to be a scientist, and vice versa, though there are the rare exceptions (Rush Holt in particular). Economics, on the other hand, is certainly more central to political discussions, but like any physical scientist, you will have to forgive me if I view any theoretical economics statement with a bit of suspicion until it is well-proven by actual data. Oddly enough, a discussion of this very topic appeared recently on both science and politics blogs, motivated by the following quote:

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.

You will not be too surprised to find that I disagree with this in multiple ways. First of all, his main economics point may very well be wrong. The reason why goes to the heart of my main philosophical complaint against economics: complicated systems are hard to generalize like that. No self-respecting physicist would

1. claim anything more than a relationship, noting the rough size of the statistical errors,


2. fail to indicate if there are exceptions or modifications to the rule that need to be noted, or


3. make such a claim without a great deal of supporting data, including independent means of validating the relationship.

Our economist friend failed all three, essentially because he assumed his decidedly oversimplistic model of human behavior was inherently correct. Speaking as a theorist, I can safely say that while I may be confident in my results, they exist solely at the level of supposition until they are experimentally verified. Going back to the silly example from the quote, if a string theorist claims there are eleven dimensions (and some believe this is probably the case) , he cannot claim it as fact until he either uses it to explain observations that were previously unexplained, or makes a testable prediction for future experiments. Of course, just to pile on the economist, there will be no end of possible interviewees willing to argue with our friendly string theorist, as physicists love to argue about these things. If a journalist fails to find outside sources to discuss the issue, then blame the journalist. I think what happened here, actually, is a confusion between a news article that has to meet journalistic standards of public skepticism with a scientific press release, which is at heart an advertisement for a scientist's work.

Perhaps more crucially, our enterprising economist may someday be hired to make decisions that affect millions or billions of people, and if he does it based on theory alone you get some kind of publicly harmful nonsense like supply-side voodoo economics or the more public failures of the IMF. Our string theorist friend will get a nice research grant from the NSF that pays for an additional post-doc or grad student or two, helping to educate the next generation of scientists, and will find that numerous colleagues are trying to confirm, falsify, modify, or extend his/her model. Put simply, physicists should be humble in trying to explain the workings of the universe, and economists equally humble in trying to explain the workings of humanity. Those who ignore this principle risk their own reputation, and in the case of economists working in public policy, the livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. That is why skepticism is incredibly necessary, and should be welcomed, not kvetched about.