ABSTRACT
The social sciences have made vast gains in some fields like smoothing out business cycles and reducing unemployment. Empirical research can increase the knowledge of nature and its workings and can be a source of power for individuals and institutions. Scientific research takes up where common sense is forced to leave off. Scientific research is an extension of everyday methods of getting information, rather than a replacement for them. Scientific research must always simplify, which is both its major advantage and an important disadvantage in comparison with common sense. Scientific reports are logical and neat, as they ought to be, but the work process that leads up to them is much less logical and neat. Scientists often like to characterize their work as a disinterested search for objective truth. A further difference between the natural and social sciences is that a complete system can seldom be constructed fruitfully in the social sciences other than economics.
