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 meaningful, whether this is happening in a reasonable way is another question.
You'll practically never see anything like that from natural scientists.
Well, in physics you have things like friction and air-resistance that, at least at first, were fudge factors to explain why objects don't obey Newton's laws. In fact looking at physics, in order to make progress it was necessary to disentangle the "fundamental behavior" of objects, i.e., how they behave on "frictionless surfaces", when hung from "strings of negligible mass" and other unrealistic assumptions, from things like friction that cause real objects to behave slightly differently. The same will undoubtedly be necessary in economics.
That having been said, I have no idea whether existing attempts to do this are any good. Physicists, of course, had the advantage that they could do experiments much more easily.
I'm sure you'll agree that long term economic numbers should be adjusted for inflation to be more meaningful, whether this is happening in a reasonable way is another question.
The problem is that "adjusting for inflation" makes sense only as a rough and vague heuristic, not as an exact measure of objective value which can be computed up to three, four, or more significant digits. The reality is that when you compare the purchasing power of money in different places and times, the differences in a myriad of relevant factors are often so great t...
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.