Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

Attributed to Paul A. Samuelson, the remark reads as a deliberately provocative rebuke to the idea that economics achieves the predictive certainty and experimental testability associated with the natural sciences. It suggests that, in Samuelson’s view at the time of utterance, the discipline’s claims to “scientific” status were not merely overstated but had recently weakened—perhaps due to increased ideological polarization, overconfidence in formal models, or failures of forecasting and policy guidance. The line functions less as a technical verdict than as a caution about epistemic humility: economic reasoning can be rigorous, but its subject matter—human behavior and institutions—makes stable laws and controlled verification unusually difficult.