One example are discussions of free trade, which is strongly favored by an overwhelming majority of economists. The standard justifications for this position are based on models whose connection to reality is tenuous at best, and which ignore a host of potentially relevant factors. (Also, I often see arguments that are clearly unsound even if the models used are assumed to be adequate, as well as naive intuitive arguments that violate elementary logic.) Now, for all I know, the majority opinion of economists on this issue could be mostly correct (though I am sure that it's wrong on some particulars), but whichever way it is, their existing justifications are far from adequate. Once you start questioning them about this, you are likely to quickly run into sneering, stonewalling, moral posturing, and what looks like ideologically induced blockheadedness.
Another example is the question of how meaningful various economic figures and quantities are. This includes various economic statistics that are often used in arguments and calculations with multiple digits of precision, even though the way they have been obtained clearly makes even the first digit, and sometimes even the order of magnitude, highly questionable. (Oskar Morgenstern's On the Accuracy of Economic Observations presents a good book-length critique of this phenomenon. This book has been conveniently ignored and forgotten by economists, even though the issues it raised have never been addressed, to my knowledge.)
Even worse, however, are various artificial quantities such as price indexes and the "real" figures based on them, which are typically reified and treated as if they were objectively measurable properties of the real world, whereas in reality they are arbitrary constructs that could be defined with as much (or rather as little) justification in different ways to yield wholly different figures. Again, with a few honorable exceptions, trying to discuss these issues with economists usually leads to frustrating unsuccessful attempts to explain what the problem is, often followed by smug dismissals. You'll practically never see anything like that from natural scientists.
I generally agree with you; however, some comments:
Even worse, however, are various artificial quantities such as price indexes and the "real" figures based on them, which are typically reified and treated as if they were objectively measurable properties of the real world, whereas in reality they are arbitrary constructs that could be defined with as much (or rather as little) justification in different ways to yield wholly different figures.
I'm sure you'll agree that long term economic numbers should be adjusted for inflation to be more mea...
A Wall Street Journal article by Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield claims that the social sciences and humanities are inferior to the sciences. The article implicitly urges undergraduates to major in science. From the article:
Do you agree with this? As a game theorist I probably have a rather biased view of the situation. It's certainly true that the ideal of the scientific method is vastly better than the practice of economists, but I think that majoring in economics provides better training for a rationalist than majoring in any of the sciences does.
Economics explicitly considers what it means to be rational. Although it infrequently considers ways in which humans are irrational, I'm under the impression that the hard sciences never do this. Furthermore, because economists can almost never perform replicable experiments we have to rely on what everyone in the profession recognizes as messy data; therefore we’re far more equipped than hard scientists to understand the limits of using statistical inference to draw conclusions from real world situations. Although I have seen no data on this, I bet that a claim by nutritionists that they have found a strong causal link between some X and heart disease would be treated with far more skepticism by the average economist than the average hard scientist.