Maybe it's a deep-seated inferiority complex. Or a desire to be accepted, even respected, by the great minds that have transformed mankind with their inventions. Otherwise, how else to explain why some economists keep insisting that economics is a science?

The announcement of the winners of the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences rekindled the science-or-no-science debate among practitioners, journalists and casual observers.

British economist Liam Halligan, writing in the U.K. Telegraph, reminds us that economics is about human behavior in the allocation of scarce resources, not scientific certainties.