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anna_macdonald comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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I've been wondering lately whether it is possible for economics to get a more empirical foundation. Clearly, a serious difficulty in the field is our lack of having a way for doing controlled trials. Does anyone know if anyone has tried bribing people to live in small-towns/enclaves (one to serve as control) for a time to see if we can isolate some effects at small levels that may or may not scale up? Or is this just too ridiculously impractical? (Or just too expensive?)
That's not true. Economics (in particular, microeconomics) can and actually does do a lot of controlled trials. I don't think that's the problem. Consider psychology -- it does a LOT of controlled trials and generates a very impressive amount of garbage.
Do you happen to know anywhere I can read simplified (layman-readable) results of some of these?
Psychology has recently been implicated in the "can't reproduce your results" scandal, suggesting that a lot of the garbage they generate is due, more or less, to pressure to publish, bias towards confirming expectations, and insufficient safeguards. Do microeconomics trials suffer the same problems?
A couple of links.
Found... Database for registering economic controlled trials and a (unpublished?) paper that suggests economic RCTs have more problems than medical trials.
Excellent, thank you!