Facts and Economic Science

Economics needs a set of agreed facts to create a scientific economic paradigm, without which economics remains trapped in the rationalist-scholastic tradition with many rival schools of conflicting theories. Physics and other natural sciences are shown in this paper to be based on an empiricism revived in the European Renaissance, leading to the scientific progress which defines modern civilization. Misguided by some philosophers of science, economics has put the theoretical cart before the empirical horse. In a scientific reform of the economic profession and economic education, this needs to change