Quote Originally Posted by tedteague View Post
hmm . . . not trying to be attacking here, but either you completely misunderstood what I said or I didn't say it very well. you missed the forest for trees.
Wouldn't be the first time I've done that! But you did compare economics to religion, after all. And at least twice you used a religious analogy to illustrate something.

Economics is a science. It is rather unique, however, because you can't have a real control variable. No two countries have identical economies, so what works in one may be disastrous in another. Its not like one can observe two independent timelines, one with a bailout and one without.
I don't know if you can call it a science, then. If you can't have controls, and you can't duplicate experiments, then there's little that is scientific. From where I sit it sounds more like Astrology than Astronomy. You use scientific sounding terms, but in the end it's all guesswork. When you can say, "Given these conditions, you will get this result; changing that condition will change the result in this manner", then you are working scientifically.

It's still using past behavior to attempt to predict future behavior
Lot's of processes do that, including religion. That doesn't make it science.