We observe that prices tend to go up, and wish to quantify that observation, maybe to test ideas about its relationship to money supply. So we have to operationalize "prices go up." We do it by sampling commonly purchased things and keeping track of their prices over time. That seems to me to be as innocuous as operationalizations come in social science. If you don't think we learn anything by doing it, I don't see how you think we can learn anything about human affairs at all.
Well, yes, if you just want to operationalize the vague statement that "prices went up," it makes sense to do it as you describe. What doesn't make sense is postulating the existence of some reified "real" value of money, and then claiming that it has changed by 2.61% or whatever since last year. (Not to even mention the even more outlandish attempts to evaluate this change in "real" value across decades and centuries, or to compare them across vastly different places, where even the set of things available on the market is largely different, as well as all sorts of further reifications such as the "real" GDP.) However, vast edifices of both theory and practical policy have been built under the assumption that you can do such things, and if one attempts to discuss them by dissolving these nebulous concepts, one encounters confusion and stonewalling.
That's a problem for all domains of knowledge including the hard sciences.
The problem is far more severe where the questions studied have some bearing on ideology, politics, and power. It's a matter of incentives, after all.
What doesn't make sense is postulating the existence of some reified "real" value of money, and then claiming that it has changed by 2.61% or whatever since last year. (Not to even mention the even more outlandish attempts to evaluate this change in "real" value across decades and centuries, or to compare them across vastly different places, where even the set of things available on the market is largely different, as well as all sorts of further reifications such as the "real" GDP.)
I would like to hear a more detailed cri...
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.