Frank Knight quote: “[In 1932, Lionel Robbins declared economics ‘the science of choice’ (Robbins 1932). In the same year, when students at …”

“When a politician, on a subject implicating science — hard science, economic science, social science — says, ‘The debate is over,’ you may be sure of two things. It’s that the debate is raging and he’s losing it.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Discussion, Fox News Sunday, February 16, 2014
2010s

“Economics is a social science, not a physical science.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 1, Chapter 1, The Economy and Economics, p. 23
Economics For Everyone (2008)

“In spite of all the foregoing, there is a science of economics, a true, and even exact, science, which reaches laws as universal as those of mathematics and mechanics. The greatest need for the development of economics as a growing body of thought and practice is an adequate appreciation of the meaning, and the limitations, of this body of accurate premises and rigorously established conclusions. It comes about in the same general way as all science, except perhaps in a higher degree, i. e., through abstraction. There are no laws regarding the content of economic behavior, but there are laws universally valid as to its form.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

There is an abstract rationale of all conduct which is rational at alt, and a rationale of all social relations arising through the organization of rational activity.
Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 127 (2009 edition)

“In spite of all the foregoing, there is a science of economics, a true, and even exact, science, which reaches laws as universal as those of mathematics and mechanics. The greatest need for the development of economics as a growing body of thought and practice is an adequate appreciation of the meaning, and the limitations, of this body of accurate premises and rigorously established conclusions. It comes about in the same general way as all science, except perhaps in a higher degree, i. e., through abstraction. There are no laws regarding the content of economic behavior, but there are laws universally valid as to its form. There is an abstract rationale of all conduct which is rational at alt, and a rationale of all social relations arising through the organization of rational activity.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 127 (2009 edition)

“I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, A Reconstruction of Economics, 1950, p. vii

“Economics is not the Emperor of the social sciences, but the Humpty Dumpty.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 3, The Price Of Everything And The Value Of Nothing, p. 83

“You see economic science in your day was a science of things; in our day it is a science of human beings.”

Edward Bellamy book Equality

Equality (1897)

“If it were not for the hope that a scientific study of men's social actions may lead, not necessarily directly or immediately, but at some time and in some way, to practical results in social improvement, not a few students of these actions would regard the time devoted to their study as time misspent. That is true of all social sciences, but especially true of economics. For economics "is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life"; and it is not in the ordinary business of life that mankind is most interesting or inspiring.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 1

“Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made. Even when I was a student, economics was still part of the moral sciences tripos at Cambridge University. It can claim to be a moral science, therefore, from its origin, if for no other reason. Nevertheless, for many economists the very term “moral science” will seem like a contradiction. We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be wertfrei and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment and has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.” Even economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, Economics As A Moral Science, 1969, p. 12

“The assumptions and definitions of mathematics and science come from our intuition”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)
Context: The assumptions and definitions of mathematics and science come from our intuition, which is based ultimately on experience. They then get shaped by further experience in using them and are occasionally revised. They are not fixed for all eternity.

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