A Floundering Lore Wallowing in a Mud of Statistics

So, it looks like more than a month has passed since my last post. My, how time flies.

I came across a great quote a few weeks ago. Like others I have shared, it comes from a story by H.G. Wells, specifically from the story "A Modern Utopia." The quote was part of a lament about the lack of usefulness of the field of economics, due to "the mass of unanalyzed and scarcely suspected assumptions upon which it rested." I remember taking a graduate course on theory building in applied linguistics which essentially came to the same point -- any new field will first need to establish the facts that theories in that field need to explain before one begin to actually develop theories of how those facts came to be.

In this state of impotent expertness, however, or in some equally unsound state, economics must struggle on—a science that is no science, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of statistics—until either the study of the material organisation of production on the one hand as a development of physics and geography, or the study of social aggregation on the other, renders enduring foundations possible.

Just gotta love that "floundering lore" line, which, unfortunately, seems to describe the state of many of the social sciences.