[hmkpoker]

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If I were an ACist, I wouldn't slag on economics.

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Who is slagging? All I said that it's not science; that doesn't mean that it's wrong or useless. The methodology employed in economics is deductive in nature, not inductive. There has ever been a scientifically valid macroeconomic experiment in the history of mankind.

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I agree with you that the "mainstream" empirical economics can hardly be called science.

I would however like to know your definition of what constitutes a science and then I would like to know if you think if maybe Austrian economics (using deductive reasoning instead of induction) would qualify.

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I'm not going to start scouring the dictionary, but I believe that something can only be considered a science when it follows the scientific method. Information is ascertained empirically from a rigidly constructed experiment that provides a control group and experiment, each of which are isolated and either identical, or in sufficient quantities to produce an accurately descriptive mean.

Economics and social sciences cannot do this. Say you want to prove, for example, that instituting socialized medicine lowers the murder rate of a country. To do this scientifically, you would need a large series of nearly identical countries that were completely isolated from each other...enough to overcome intra-group variance...to implement socialisn in the experimentals and not in the controls, and observe the results. This is so impossible that nothing short of God could concoct such an experiment. We would literally need to create hundreds of worlds to accurately overcome third variables (of which there are many).

So what does an economist do? He slugs around facts and figures in a manner that makes it seem like he did something meaningful. This countries have 21.45% less this, the poverty rate is down 16%, the "mean quality of life" is better in this country, etc. This works wonders because the status quo has no grasp of theory, and lacks the intellectual capacity to ask critical questions about these factoids. Can these results be attributed to the cause you claim, or to a third variable? Do these results exist because of the proposed source, or in spite of it? What would the results be if a different variable were implemented, all else being equal?

These are important questions, and without these considerations, facts are irrelevent. Given what politicians want us to swallow as scientific truth, you could prove that anything causes anything; just find a few obscure variables that you want to correlate mildly (not being concerned about statistical accuracy,) make a lot of references to important-sounding sources, and present it with zeal. If a biologist did that, he would be laughed off the stage. When an economist does that, he gets appointed a new position.

And to answer your last question, Austrian economics is most definately not science.