The Limits of Social Sciences

Brad Delong, after a long post on the possibilities of a US dollar crash, writes:

...Each side had its own preferred models that functioned very well at explaining the past historical cases that they focused on. But there was no way right now of settling, empirically, whether a model built to explain the U.S. in 1985 or Korea in 1998 was more applicable to the U.S. in 2006--you had to make a bet, either that continuities in U.S. economic structure were important, or that financial globalization was important, in choosing your model and your terms of analysis.

It was very interesting. And very disturbing. Brilliant economists, thinking hard, unable to reach even the beginnings of analytical agreement about how to model the distribution of possible futures.

Not exactly reassuring - Brad and co either are or were in many cases top government advisors. And he admits that not only don't they agree, they don't agree on the basis of their disagreement.

Now, extend the metaphor to the study and practice of internation relations. Is the model for Iraq: Kosovo (humanitarian enterprise, leading to more stability in the region) or something more like Iraq, circa 1920 (imperialist adventure to seize oil reserves)? After two and a half years, the war is looking less like either. But before the war, I think it's fair to say that these were the camps. That said, how bad does this look? For all the pretensions to "science", how valuable can they be for predictions?