Nice piece which to me reads as being an accurate account of the recent history of the field (as far as I know it).<p>Short summary: 90% of the work that is taken seriously in economics is empirical. Moreover, we only care about cases where causal inference is possible and those are the papers that get published. (If your first complaint about a published piece in an economics journal is “correlation does nor imply causation,” we know that too and the kind of work which can fall for that criticism is only rarely and accidentally going to make it through the refereeing process.)<p>Far better than a similar, much less informed piece from Aeon which was shared here a few days ago…
i think the bit about old paradigm vs new paradigm tenure application bias overlooks a few things. this bias doesn’t just affect the <i>proportion</i> of admissions across paradigms, it’s a selection filter that allows only the <i>best</i> of the new paradigm people through. so even if this bias results in only 5% of the field being new-paradigmers after the first round, that selection might mean that closer to 10% of the overall <i>output</i> comes from new-paradigmers (because it’s selected for new-paradigmers which are in some way exceptional). that’s not enough to reverse the direction of this selection, but the effect would reduce the requirement for the other “luck”-based elements in order for the new paradigm to “take root”.
I studied MIT's development policy course. I was surprised how many times I guessed something and the results were different. A qualitative interpretation of RCT results is the end game. It was hard to do it right, and easy to do it wrong.<p>I find the design of RCTs very artsy.