The best established hypothesis in the social sciences is …

I am technically and economist and thus can’t deny that I am (blush) a social scientist. I have noticed that we are not quite universally admired. As C.P. Snow noted there are two cultures. The scientific culture which stresses that we are not *real* scientists and the humanistic culture which considers us the supreme example of idiocy due to irrational adoration of natural science.

Now it is not true that every social scientist falls into one of these two camps. I personally agree with both of them.

Still one of the observations that stuck in my mind while I was pining for the discovery of the blog was that social scientists lack of , non so, esprit di corps (je ne sais pas, coscenza di gruppo) is the casualness with which social scientists refer to their pet theory as the “best established hypothesis in the *social* sciences” (the behitss). For example, Richard Herrnstein considered the claim that IQ has a hereditary component the behitss and Eugene Fama considered the hypothesis that market returns were unpredictable which is (was) logically equivalent to the efficient market hypothes is the behitss soon before concluding that he efficient markets hypothesis was supported by the thoroughly demonstrated result that market returns could be predicted using variables which should be useful in predicting market returns.

I would say that the best established hypothesis in the social sciences is that, when considering the natural sciences, most social scientists suffer from inferiority complexes.

I know that this hypothesis, as so many in the social sciences, can only be tested with subjective data. However it is consistent with all data available to me.