Just like you can reliably model a gas but not its particles, i think you can reliably model a crowd but not its individuals. To me economics is the science of predicting the interactions of crowds.
It aspires to be and everyone certainly hopes it will be, the behavioural economics crowd thinks they are headed towards that certainly. Their argument that the reason for the lack of predictive power in economics is the reliance on models that assume individuals are rational actors seems to have a lot of merit.
At the moment the techniques available and the predictive power puts it far down the spectruum that has the hard sciences on one side and pseudoscience on the other with the soft/social sciences in the middle.
