Economics is a Social Science

[sanantone]

This might seem like common knowledge to most of you, but many don't seem to know that economics is a social science. It's the study of human behavior in relation to limited resources. Sometimes, economics programs might be housed in a business school, but economics programs are often housed outside of business schools. Sometimes, universities will have two economics programs: one taught in a business school and one taught in a department of arts and sciences. Even when an economics program is housed in a business school, it's still a social science. There are psychology programs housed in life science departments right alongside biology and public health programs, but psychology is still a behavioral science. Economics uses numbers, but all quantitative research in any field uses numbers. Just like every other social science, economics has many gray areas due to the complex nature and unpredictability of human behavior; it's not like physics, chemistry, or math. 

Economists don't only study the health of the economy or business decisions. They've studied people's mate choices, college major decisions, how finances relate to criminal behavior, and political decisions to go to war. This topic came to mind because I just encountered someone who downplayed the social sciences right after he referenced a study conducted by a social scientist who teaches economics in a university's social sciences building. This happens a lot. People will reference a social scientist in one field or another but will say that the social sciences are not serious fields of study. You can't have it both ways. Why reference a social scientist when you think the social sciences are junk? That's like an atheist using the Bible or the Quran to answer how life came to be.