What a degree in business and economics is worth...

[Reese Tora]

What, exactly, do you think scientific rigour means?

I was jokingly agreeing with you.

Whups, I thought you were chiding me for using a laymans definition somehow. much apologies.

The value of money itself changes even if inflation was non-existant.  Even when it's been adjusted to inflation, do you think a North Korean would place American money above his own?  Thus, the value of the dollar flucuates and thus it is not an accurate form of measurement.

Hence economics is almost entirely relative with and percieved stability formed simply by convincing large numbers of people that something has a certain value.

And? it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be used to study or understand.  The greeks were studying and understanding planetary motion long before they had anything more accurate to measure it with than their own eyes.  As you gain understanding, you can refine your ability to make measurements which increases your ability to gain understanding.

Inaccurate information can be just as useful as accurate information, so long as the presence of the inaccuracy is understood.

[superluser]

[Sorry for the bump, but (A) it's less than 2 weeks and (B) it was either this or a new thread, since I suspect some of you will find this interesting.]

For an interesting argument as to why economics should *not* be studied scientifically (or at least that current studies are fundamentally flawed), look at this.

In just one of many examples, centralized currency—the kind we use today—was invented during the Renaissance as a way of curbing the creation of wealth from the bottom up. The people of Late Middle Ages Europe enjoyed the use of multiple local currencies, biased towards re-investment and transaction. They became so wealthy, they invested in their local futures in the form of cathedrals and preventative maintenance on their infrastructure. People ate and lived well: women in England were taller in the Late Middle Ages than at any time up to the 1970s. A waning monarchy with limited means of generating value to compete with the rising merchant class saw this immense and distributed wealth as an opportunity for extraction. Kings outlawed local currencies and forced subjects to use "coin of the realm," lent into existence at interest.

My point is less to expose the rather unkind origins of central money systems than to reveal the unacknowledged biases of these currencies themselves. Our money isn't water—it is a programmed currency, heavily biased towards wealth extraction from the periphery to the center. So any scientific analysis of the current economy can not be undertaken without acknowledgment of the fact that its many emergent currency systems have been outlawed and repressed in favor of just one highly managed one. We would like to treat the economy as the circulatory system of an organism, but the components of the bloodstream have been quite artificially limited to those that favor cell depletion and value extraction.

The very best thing science can offer economics is a fuller understanding of what it means to work with a model. While most economists are more than willing to admit that their equations and theories are mere models, they seem unprepared to acknowledge that the economy on which those models are based is itself a model. Economics is at best a modeling of a model—a systemic approach to a game. And that game isn't even being played particularly well or intentionally by most of us; we have better things to do with our time than calculate the efficiency of our transactions, and more pressing emotional needs than value maximization.

I've never even seen people analyze things this way.  I may have to buy the book.