Lars P. Syll writes (in an otherwise great post),

Stop pretending that we have laws in economics. There are no universal laws in economics. Economies are not like planetary systems or physics labs. The most we can aspire to in real economies is establishing possible tendencies with varying degrees of generalizability.

I might be totally off base, but different people seem to have different ideas of what an economic “law” is.

In economics, (some of us believe) we have laws of causality; i.e. if A, then B. These are different from sociological laws, where humanity obeys some kind of deterministic pattern of action to reach some pre-determined outcome. These kind of beliefs, actually, oftentimes are characteristic of socialist and historicist literature, although it’s everywhere (conservative, libertarian, et cetera). No, economic laws don’t give economists the power to predict the future, but they do provide the ability to explain events.