why is economic considered as social science and how does it relate with computer science?

Answer 1

Economics is a social science because it deals with laws governing the behavior of people. All social sciences analyze the behavior of people. It cannot be a precise science because not everyone will react the same way in a given situation. However the assumption is that most people are rational and rational behavior can be analyzed scientifically. So economics can predict that when the price of butter goes up people will buy less butter and more margarine.
Computer science belongs to the class of natural sciences. Predictability in natural sciences is certain. For example, whenever you mix 2 units of hydrogen to 1 unit of oxygen, you always get water. There are no exceptions. So the difference between the two is that with one (comp sci) there is 100% certainty of outcome and with the other (econ) the outcome is not so certain.
PS: I should hasten to add that whenever we program a computer and get wrong or misleading results the problem is not with the science but with more often than not with the programmer. Remember the golden rule with programming - GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT!

Answer 2

I dunno man, I'm in business school for economics - looking to get my masters soon at BC or somewhere else in the Boston area that reputable...and econ is part of business programs.

It's kind of annoying that they consider it a social science since there is so much density to econ - it's not just theory and fluff about consumer behavior. Granted, some studies are of behavior - I'm working a problem that tries to see how being black affects getting denied a mortgage, holding all else equal. So the overall problem is measuring a behavior - discrimination - which is qualitative. But there's math backing it up!! Econometrics isn't the same as psych!!

Bottomline - economics is a diverse area of study and if you're good at running solid economics studies you can apply it to anything from crime rates to calculating wage gaps to seeing how merely joining the EU affects GDP! Freakonomics is an example of using regression analysis to pick out hidden causalities - but read it w/ a grain of salt, b/c some of the conclusions are seen as shakey by economists...common sense will keep you skeptical!

Comp sci - you can't run a regression with 5,000 beta hats (the vars affecting beta hat 1 which it what you're testing, and hold all other beta hats constant to see how stuff affects each other). We use programs like SAS and STATA - SAS is a command driven and powerful program used to regress data. The output data is analyzed to come to conclusions, but you couldn't create the output of a huge multi variate regression by hand unless you hate yourself and enjoy the idea of never leaving your house again.