• grte@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    Give me examples of economists coming up with hypotheses and then building experiments to test them.

      • grte@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        The global financial crisis was a huge surprise to most economists and is basically the #1 example of the field not having any predictive power, something you generally want from a hard science.

          • grte@lemmy.ca
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            2 days ago

            Sure. I guess this falls under ‘natural experiments’ which is what David Card got his nobel for, figuring out how to test hypotheses some of the time. Now try and do peer review on that result.

            • 🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦@lemmy.ca
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              2 days ago

              “While I find the methodology highly suspect and the ethics abhorrent, my biggest objection to the analysis is that the author seems to be drawing a positive conclusion from a clearly null result.”