Which is a moot point because science is done without controlled experiments all of the time, e.g. astrophysics, epidemiology, sociology. One of the most famous cases in medicine is the connection of drinking water to cholera discovered using observation to connect deaths to a nearby well.
Well it’s great that they do more than just design experiments and hack p-vales all day;) Geez, had no idea it was such a controversial statement. What do you want to say, every application of math or coding counts as science? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science
Whether something is a "real science" is based on whether or not science is done, not the difficulty of the subject matter. Spending so much time trying to narrowly semanticize science in a way that specifically excludes economics is navel gazing. The purpose of these discussions seems to be to discredit economics and discount it's predictive power by defining it as not-science, but predictive power doesn't come from the definition of the word science, it comes from the statistical methods that science uses.
Does it involve research? Does the research produce models with predictive power? Ok, let's use it, just like every policy maker in the world pre-2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics
Which is a moot point because science is done without controlled experiments all of the time, e.g. astrophysics, epidemiology, sociology. One of the most famous cases in medicine is the connection of drinking water to cholera discovered using observation to connect deaths to a nearby well.