re: #293 Obdicut

Economics is not a hard science, no, not at all. Especially Austrian economics.

Ludwig, I don’t think I can really do justice to describing what makes something a ‘hard’ science— do you have it in you right now?

I didn’t see this, so I will try for an off the cuff definition of something that is rarely defined.

Hard sciences are mathematical in nature and based on making mathematical statements about measurable quantities that are themselves objectively defined.

What I mean by that last thought is though even though the units you chose to measure length are arbitrary, the notion of length is not, and more importantly, a meter stick reads the same measure for everyone who reads it - if they all do so correctly.

the difference with the soft sciences is that take psychology, you can talk about people responding in certain ways to certain things, but everyone responds a little differently. There is no “meter” in the field that will be true for all observers. This does not make the observations of psychology worthless. It does make them much more subjective and frequently impossible to write meaningful mathematics for.