Economics is not Statistics (and definitely not statistics).
Most of the discipline focuses on testing models and making inferences on observational data. The techniques for dealing with that sort of data, of course, build on Statistics, but their nature is different enough that there is Econometrics.
A large part of economics is not empirical at all -- despite the fact that people get Nobel prizes pretending this not to be the case.
Even in the context of experimental economics, since the behavior of the observed vary depending on the mode of observation, the contexts in which the most straightforward Statistical methods designed to apply to engineering/chemistry/biology experiment type situations are not directly applicable (although it is great when they agree with the fancier methods).
>A large part of economics is not empirical at all -- despite the fact that people get Nobel prizes pretending this not to be the case.
I'm not sure which parts of the field or which prize winners you are talking about. To be clear: you think economics is _not actually empirical_, but people are awarded Nobel Prizes for _pretending that it is_? That's a little odd. Let me know if that's not what you meant.
> To be clear: you think economics is _not actually empirical_
That is a misrepresentation of what I said.
To be clear, I think what I said:
>>A large part of economics is not empirical at all
E.g., as an example, Kahneman's Nobel is solely a product of taking an axiomatic theory and designing experiments where regular people who are actually not being paid according to their performance are gently prodded into violating the axioms in weird settings. It is attractive to people who want to claim that clearly the plebes cannot be allowed to choose for themselves as they are not "rational".
The only meaning of "rational" in Economics is that individuals choose the best alternative according to their preferences among a constrained set of alternatives. Here an "alternative" or "bundle" is a point in the entire commodity space.
The only test of this is consistency with GARP: A choice is not rational if a feasible and more preferred alternative exists.
Economics is not Statistics (and definitely not statistics).
Most of the discipline focuses on testing models and making inferences on observational data. The techniques for dealing with that sort of data, of course, build on Statistics, but their nature is different enough that there is Econometrics.
A large part of economics is not empirical at all -- despite the fact that people get Nobel prizes pretending this not to be the case.
Even in the context of experimental economics, since the behavior of the observed vary depending on the mode of observation, the contexts in which the most straightforward Statistical methods designed to apply to engineering/chemistry/biology experiment type situations are not directly applicable (although it is great when they agree with the fancier methods).