posted February 07, 2026 12:25 AM            

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For example, economics holds a position of scientific authority that is widely contested,
and yet undeniably powerful. Observers have long noted an affinity between economics and
astrology. Both seek to analyze social phenomena to outline the field of the probable and thereby
guide future action. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, economists were called on to
justify their status as scientists, and the specter of astrology returned. At that time, economists
seemed to be the very incompetent forecasters Holmes wrote of, who brought society to ruin
rather than adjusting it to the probable. A cliché was revived in the wake of the crisis: “economic
forecasting only exists to make astrology look respectable.” Prominent economists like Robert
Shiller and Raj Chetty were forced to write articles with headlines like “Is Economics a
Science?” and “Yes, Economics is a Science.” Shiller invoked the history of demarcation
between “astronomical science” and astrology, suggesting that the “economic sciences” were in
a similar state of contestation to where astronomy was in the late 19 th century. Around the same
time, the economist Paul Krugman wrote that “economics as practiced doesn’t look like a
science,” arguing that the field had lost its scientific dignity due to bad incentives. The
incompetence of the economists’ prophecies forced them to account for their discipline’s
scientific status.

Understanding economics—and this could apply to other social sciences, and even
human sciences—not simply as a contested science in an eternal struggle to gain pure scientific
recognition, but as a discipline and set of practices occupying a position of strength on a vast
frontier-like spectrum between science and non-science gives us the beginning of a model for
interpreting the puzzling debates that emerged in the wake of the financial crisis. Economics
facilitates the adjustment of society to the probable. Its hegemony—which is not mutually
exclusive with the contestation of its scientific authority, its ‘unfixed-ness,’ as Magistrate Freschi
might have put it—means that the field of the probable, what counts as probable, is decided on
the terms of economists. Achieving an adjustment of society that is just will require not only
competent prophecy, but also an understanding of how competence is constructed in the first
place.

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posted February 09, 2026 02:02 PM            

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Originally posted by HRH-FishAreFish:
“Economic forecasting only exists to make astrology look respectable.”

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