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> As far as I can tell, economics is a faith-based guild, not a social
> science.
I don't know, I think it is a social science with special characteristics and a peculiar institutional history and position. Actually we should probably distinguish between economics the social science and Economics the discipline. The former being 'the study of economic phenomena' and the latter 'what happens in Economics departments and journals'. Economics the discipline is weird among the academic social sciences in teaching a doctrinal core like a natural or physical science. You don't really learn much about debates until you reach a pretty high level. As in the natural sciences, historical 'advances' leave their traces mainly by getting something named after them - the Pigou effect, the Slutsky equation, Walras' Law, Pareto efficiency, the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem, and so on.
At higher levels, Economics is actually more riven with debate than a lot of people think, and a lot of small-‘e’ economics gets done on a pragmatic basis at some distance from the theoretical core, especially around the policy bureaucracy and in banks. And of course a bunch of people study economic phenomena outside Economics. Most Economists tend to be able to apply the theoretical core and develop it to amazing degrees of complexity, but not able to justify it, being out of their depth in broader sociological theory. And of course this leads to a certain amount of intellectual insecurity, which manifests as arrogance, and Economics the discipline now polices its boundaries pretty jealously.
Ben Fine and Dmitris Milonakis recently put out a pair of very interesting books on the history of Economics' split from the social sciences ('From Political Economy to Economics') and its return to conquer ('From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics').
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com