No they can’t, they just pretend to be, and economics is a notoriously overvalued and worthless “discipline” for precisely this reason.
I forgot to split;
Social-sciences can use formal-logical models ( If there was only a branch that, ahh ye system-science ) and hence can become purely descriptive. ( They can't become formal-logical themselves, just like physics can never become formal-logical, nor formal-science, it's not mathematics, it's just empiricism based on observations that are interpreted by humans ( until the first proper neural casual models are here, then machines can have a go at it ) ), giving the optimal way to achieve a goal is still descriptive, unless that goal must be satisfied or optimized( having the goal is normative, but you can use descriptive sciences just like you can use mathematics to reach goals )
Unless of course mathematics are incapable of modelling humans and their behaviour ( which implies that, the agent-agent interaction has the property of strong-emergence and I imply right now that strong-emergence might be impossible to model fully, strong-emergence is non-sense though ) -> They either contain infinite infinity sequences or actions that are neither discrete nor continuous, and a lot of other whacky stuff
I would say that economics used to be rather worthless and a lot of people try to make it worthless again ( 'heterodox schools' ), but thanks to people like John von Neumann it got a little bit closer to becoming actual science, rather than opinion-clashing, bad arguments, and essentially a giant ex falso quodlibet ( it still is, but less so than before as mathematicians started pouring, also some engineers IIRC, made axiomatic models, and also started empiricism, less ideology, more science. Still far from only science ). I never meant it can become mathematics nor equivalent to it, that'd be preposterous, but mathematics can be integrated and embedded into it, just like empiricism.
By value I'd say mathematics ( I include theoretical CS, probability-theory etc here ), nature-sciences, engineering, theoretical linguistics is top, although value is obviously subjective, until we define it in a well-defined manner.
I think it has been more or less said in a non-explicit manner in previous responses, but races are a socio-cultural construct so it would make no sense to define them globally. Also, despite the claim here there is no western view on races, different parts of Europe for example had and have very different views on race, without even considering how much their views differ from the view in the US.
It's not well-defined yes, I think it was used to refer to something below sub-species, although subspecies itself was used to distinguish easier between members of a species by morphological differences.
Cambridge and Euros are by far best or at least most invested in social sciences but when it comes to economics I prefer American and Japanese sources(or capitalist democratic parts of Far East in general). It’s kind of funny one of best economist out of Cambridge is South Korean.
Euros grow up well verse in social sciences. Americans and many Asians academics are more focus on materialistic fields and businesses from get go. I started working at 12 illegally/under table so it’s hard for me to take some of these “bougie” intellectuals from Western Europe seriously when talking about “working class”, business, or economist especially outside banking and public sector.
I prefer science over arbitrary valuation. It seems like you are talking about 'heterodox schools' though, they aren't science to begin with and they haven't been incorporated, unless they make an axiomatic correct model or have proper empirical analysis in which case they actually talk science.
I don't know what Euros are for you, but me and most of my peers have a strong mathematics focus ( whether it be Maths, CS, some engineers ). The campuses usually get better funding in those areas as well. And I am from Europe