I think soft sciences are generally academic fields where society is treated like a piece of technology, and I dont think that's the correct approach. you can look at these things in the way econ does, but you're fooling yourself into thinking that a formal model can provide the answers
Yeah I agree, that the humanities often seem to employ an epistemology better suited to the physical systems of hard science.
Personally, and I suspect my opinion here could change drastically over time, I just don't think we are there yet, in terms of understanding psychological phenomena, and by extension human social and economic phenomena, in terms as hard as those in which we understand physical systems.
I think technology will help, i.e. more data and better data analysis, but I also think we will benefit from some number of future paradigm shifts in terms of how we approach the humanities.
I still suspect much of this boils down to how consciousness is a deep black box as far as hard science is concerned, and consciousness is a sort of supervenient bottleneck that is somewhat upstream from the humanities, insofar as the humanities are predicated upon consciousness as a phenomenon.