A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

The above is my one sentence explanation of why I have little time for political science:

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

The numerologists that dominate the social sciences labour under a delusion, the delusion that the methods of the physical sciences can be applied to the humanities and social sciences. While mathematics is a powerful tool in economics, where relatively objective quantitive data abounds, as it drifts into sociology and political science its value lessens dramatically. Human beings have free will and act from enormously complex motives. People's explanations for why they act are often false, even when they are not trying to be deceitful. Ludwig von Mises, who was perhaps too hostile to quantitative methods in economics, struck upon this problems six decades ago when writing Human Action.