This article will discuss reasons why economics is a science and not an art.

Ngaire Woods said in a Twitter post:

"Economics is a science, and not an art. Of course the phrase is qualified, but "economic science" doesn't capture the breadth of what economists study, but it certainly captures the core."

Economics is based on the application of the scientific method.

However, the discipline has been accused of being anti-intellectual, detached from human experience and labouring under a pretentious, self-righteousness that is ultimately self-defeating.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson's explanation for why there's no such thing as a free lunch, which has recently made the rounds again, is one of many examples.

It's also at odds with the much ballyhooed catchphrase of 'shared prosperity', which is the driver of the western welfare state, and it runs counter to the work of recent Nobel Prize winners.

Of course, it's not the first time economists have been accused of smug, self-serving analysis. Economist Steven Levitt's Pulitzer Prize-winning Freakonomics was criticized for failing to value people's choices of employment over big corporate profits.

Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner responded that there was no choice to be made between what people did for a living and the big corporate profits, but a disagreement of fact, not opinion.

Similarly, it's not the first time people have accused economists of being elitist. Many popular writers and academics are smug, or just ignorant of the actual field. David Graeber is among the most popular.

In a 2015 interview, Quartz Graeber was asked if economists had no imagination: "Absolutely not," Graeber said, explaining that most economists don't think of ideas like the commons and alternative currencies.

"When the first commons was created, called the commons or dikes or some kind of use for something natural that everybody owned, the conventional response was 'Aha! But the things are so hard to run! The banks don't want us to have that.'

And to me, it seems obvious that when you have something that everybody owns, a great thing and people use, and when you try to take it away you make a lot of damage."

When you take these critiques to heart, then, it's tempting to declare economics a science. Economists don't deny human nature but they believe it's a malleable beast, and that it can be shaped in a manner beneficial to us as a species.

Let's see why.

The math of economics:

Economists have a vast number of models for understanding the real world. As those models get more and more complex, you'll notice that their mathematics is getting simpler.

I think we can rightly speak of this as a mathematical progression of one complex equation becoming a linear equation and eventually becoming a quadratic equation. It's hard to be precise, but most likely these are equations like:

Q: For the fraction of the population who pays for things with their labor

T: For the amount of time for which you have to work to buy something

U: For the unit price of an item

E: For the level of interest

Here's a simple model which I think captures the essence of economics. This is a simplified version of the standard financial model. We can see that consumers must always pay the same price for a particular good.

Yet, producers can sell their goods at a higher price than the cost of production. This could be because they have monopolies over a certain market, they are able to sell goods at a loss, or they can rip-off customers.

In this model, capitalists make money because they are able to make goods cheaper than what consumers are willing to pay for them.

Ripple-like, money is transmitted from producer to consumer using money. This money, we can label "money" as we usually do, is made of 'physical' currency.

But in economics this "money" is used to facilitate the exchange of goods between producers and consumers. The more money a consumer has, the more effective she is as a consumer because she can buy more goods.

But the more goods she has, the less effective she is as a producer because it takes time to make money from buying more.

If the number of different goods she needs to buy is high then this can be a problem since a monetary scheme is only useful when it can efficiently transmit money from producer to consumer. This is why we have a monetary economy.

The model might look a little convoluted but let's give it a quick breakdown. First, let's examine how consumers and producers pay for different goods.

Producers charge consumers using a certain price in a certain currency. This price is the total cost of production. Consumers must pay this price whether they buy the goods or not.

When a consumer does not buy, then producers must wait for the customer to sell the goods. Consumers make money by buying more than the total amount of money which is in circulation and therefore they receive an interest payment on their capital.

Money also has an interest rate which is the nominal interest rate minus the rate of inflation which is the rate of increase of the money supply. A one percent rate of inflation is a great policy but 1.3 percent is much more problematic.

It means that money creation is not very effective. So it looks like money producers need money which consumers have and vice versa. But this is not how it works.

As noted before, producers make money when they can make goods cheaper than what consumers are willing to pay for them. The higher the price, the greater the opportunity to make money, so consumers must pay a higher price if they are willing to buy more.

And since a consumer's expenditure is constrained by the amount of money which is in circulation, producers can charge consumers a higher price if they are willing to sell more than the amount of money which is in circulation.

The total amount of money is the number of pieces of currency in circulation and the nominal interest rate is the interest rate less inflation, but only for the nominal interest rate.

See? Science.