Do Economic Papers Contain So Many Mistakes Because Economics is not a Science?

David Chester thinks I missed the mark in my How Many Citations Are Fawlty in the Average Economics Paper?. His comment starts:

In common with many economic writings you have failed to hit the nail truely on the head. lets face it, it is not that economics is an inexact science. It is that this unhappy fact gives the writers in it liscence to write almost anything they choose. No longer do they have to quote references that they actually read and which pertain to the matter in hand.

While I am not ready to join the Post Autistic Economics crowd I am at least somewhat sympathetic to David's point. But I stand by my original statement - there are so many mistakes because there are few incentives to be careful or to catch the mistakes.

But David's conjecture is a testable one. If he is correct, there should be far fewer errors in, say, physics papers than in economics or sociology papers. That is a study I would love to see.