Is Economics a Science?

             At least in TOK, economics gets grouped in the human sciences, along with psychology, anthropology and others.     According to Merriam-Webster, the simple definition for science is :"knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation," or a "subject that is formally studied in a college, university, etc."   Economics is, at the very least, a science according to the second definition, since it gets studied in college.  The simple definition of economics, also according to Merriam-Webster is "a science concerned with the process or system by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought."                Economists do experiments, using the scientific method, and often have results that can be replicated, as would be expected of a science. One paper in Science found that of the 18 (which is a pretty small sample size) other papers on microeconomics it had looked at, 11 (61%) similar results when the experiment was repeated. This is not absolutely great, but if you compare it to a 2015 analysis of psychology papers, which could only replicate 36% of the published results, it's pretty good.    

           

            However, it could (and has been) argued that economics is too unreliable to be considered a science.    Like most of the human studies, economics is based on humanity, and it's hard to exclusively focus on one variable of humanity and look at its affect. It wouldn't be hard to find a variable, but correlation of that variable to something else doesn't necessarily equal causation.  With economics, there are too many variables that are too interconnected to each other to be able to separate and find the exact effect they have.      

       

         I would still argue that economics are a science, because even if they aren't always right, neither are the other more "established" sciences.  For example, Watson and Crick went through a couple of different models of DNA before they came up with the currently accepted one.  Science is a process, where theories will be made, and then some will be shown to be incorrect. That economics has such a varied set (humanity) it needs to draw results from simply means there will be a lot more incorrect theories.