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This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

economist.com

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Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#131

Post by benibela »

duxut_staglatz wrote: post #15
xyzzy2020 wrote: post #3

Totally bonkers: economists using science to approach "social science" issues. Social sciences should be ashamed that this is not the norm, we should all be startled and surprised that this is a new thing and evidently people have just been using a system of high-fives and good wishes to solve the world's social problems.

Is there nothing between RCTs and "high-fives" to estimate causal effects? Economists seem to run awfully long journal articles if they all boil down to high fives.

There is a lot of research on how to estimate causal effects from data.

And text books. "Causality" by Pearl about causal models in general. "Causation, Prediction, and Search" by Spirtes about how to learn the models from data.

For example assume the world consists of three random variables A, B, and C. If A causes B and B causes C (as DAG A -> B -> C), then A and C are correlated. But if the model is A -> B BB->C. So you can falsify such causal models without an rct

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#132

Post by anoncake »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #129
cyborgx7 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you are just responding to the argument made by the comment you are responding to. But I would argue that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how the Nobel family feels about the Prize. The Ecenomics Prize is sham regardless, and if the Nobel family participate in that sham, it doesn't make it less so.

Sham? Really? What makes it a sham? They hand out counterfeit money as the prize? Some dudes on a bar stool in Liverpool decide who wins? It's a prize that is awarded by the Nobel committee, that has Nobel's name in the title, that for the sake of shortness we call the Nobel Prize in Economics, even though the full name is something longer. What about that is a sham?

The Nobel Prize are prizes donated by Alfred Nobel. The Riksbank prize wasn't so it's not a Nobel and calling it so is a lie.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#133

Post by QuesnayJr »

xyzzy2020 wrote: post #128
QuesnayJr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "science". For most topics in economics it's basically impossible to an RCT. You can't say "Let's turn the US into a centrally planned economy, and see what happens." RCT based macroeconomics, or trade economics are basically impossible. Instead people have long relied on observational data, and did the best they could to handle the issues this caused. RCTs didn't start with Duflo. (Duflo isn't even the first…

Define science the usual way, the essence of science is reproducibility: if you can't achieve that you are not practicing science.

Can astronomy reproduce the Big Bang? Can biologists reproduce the Cambrian explosion? Can geologists reproduce end of the Mesozoic Era?

It's harder to know things we can't do experiments, but we can still know them. In economics, there is a rich tradition of relying on "natural experiments", which is where something like a natural disaster or a law change allows researchers to examine the effects. This is how it was shown that the effect of minimum wage increases on employment is very small. The financial crisis falsified an entire school of macroeconomics.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#134

Post by no_identd »

_0ffh wrote: post #92

Yearly reminder that there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. It is the "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences", established in 1968, to coattail on the prestige of the original. Edit: Your DVs don't change the facts.

I normally refrain from saying things like "This should be the top comment.", but in this case I'd go as far as say that this comment should get stickied. To understand why I say that, I'd recommend watching this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLtEo8lplwg

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#135

Post by duxut_staglatz »

samvher wrote: post #81
notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

I'm not quite sure how to place your comment, maybe because the term credibility revolution is new to me. Yes, RCTs are used to test and provide evidence, and the null results can be very informative. But I think the external validity point made in the article is absolutely fair. Note that I work in RCTs so I'm definitely not opposed to the approach, but I think there are still a lot of improvements to be made on thi…

See [0] for the "credibility revolution"

[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.3

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