Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
One I've mentioned before.

In 2013, the US enacted fiscal austerity and monetary expansion. The Keynesians, headed up by Paul Krugman, said this this fiscal austerity would cost IIRC ~600k jobs over the next year. Market Monestarists, headed up by Scott Sumner, said it would not because of the monetary offset the Fed declared it would engage. Krugman said this would be a test of Market Monetarism (since Krugman loves the "us vs them" bullshit). Sumner said it wouldn't because clearly that's not how you test a dynamic broad system, but that it would be a test of the specific predictions and claims for why.

So, Keynesians said the economy would slow down in comparison to the fiscal austerity while Market Monetarists said it would stay the same or possibly speed up slightly because of the monetary offset. 2013 happened, it sped up slightly. Krugman acted like it never happened, Sumner continued doing what he does.

This is an example of forming a question, developing a hypothesis, making a prediction, running a test, and analyzing the results. It's a whole lot easier when you have a lab, but this is still the scientific method.
This is what an argument looks like. One that doesn't have any grounded experiment to fall back on.

There's an incredible book that really demonstrates what a Scientific argument looks like: The Histology of Neuroanatomy by Santiago Ramon y Cajal. Basically around 1900, new methods for treating and staining brain sections were discovered, these methods highlighted and lowlighted different aspects of the underlying neural structure. On top of this evidence, grand arguments were had about what any of it all meant. It really is a beautiful book that works through all the evidence, all the sorts of explanations for the evidence, how the best arguments were settled on by Cajal, and (outside of the book) how they were eventually demonstrated true.

There's no good in you and I fighting over Economics in this way until we agree on what a Science really looks like. This would be a great example of one to talk about.