Monday, December 20, 2010

Social sciences are NOT pseudo sciences.

We would have heard jokes about one armed economists, 7 economists in a room with 8 opinions etc. We are flooded with books on management, leadership, economics, psychology etc-many of which profess starkly contrasting views. The layperson may be forgiven for thinking that the authors are like the 6 blind men of Hindustan-each seeing the subject from his own limited perspective. But this is precisely the point. There is no other way to study a social science.

As aptly mentioned in Robert Murphy'sbook "Lessons for the Young Economist"
Most professionals in the social sciences think that the same method the “scientific method”—should be used in their fields as well . However, the problem is that, quite literally, the objects of their study have minds of their own . It has proved fiendishly difficult to come up with a set of concise laws that accurately predict the behavior of people in various circumstances . In the social sciences, especially economics, things are so much more complicated that in many cases it is simply impossible to perform a truly controlled experiment
In Plain English, that means that things depend on the context, research is a GUIDE to action
and not the recipe in itself

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