The disciplines we call the “hard sciences” such as chemistry and physics inhabit the cold, sterile world of laboratories, uncontaminated by a boundless assortment of potential impurities.
Today, economics pretends to be one of the hard sciences, yet the laboratories provided by the real world are disorderly, even chaotic, insusceptible to sanitization and control. The information we are able to glean from them is thus limited in its power to offer laws of general applicability, to explain the world. It is not that there is a lack of potentially useful information; after all, economists and social scientists are gathering and analyzing statistical data constantly. Rather, those data are limited by the density of the causal atmosphere of the environment from which they emerge, a rich and variable sea of causes and effects. Isolating one or even a few factors becomes impossible.
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