The award of a Nobel Prize in economics, but not in psychology, sociology or anthropology, seems to imply that economics is not a social science, but an exact one, like chemistry or physics. Underpinning this idea is the thought that the human world operates like the physical world. Economists themselves perpetuate this impression by dealing in hard quantitative data, as opposed to observation and qualitative analysis. The defining feature of the natural sciences is their consistent success in making predictions, but almost all economists failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis. The striking collapse of LTCM, a hedge fund set up by two economists who were later awarded the Nobel Prize, further underscores the limits of economics to make accurate forecasts.