108d4836_brary_of_Economics_and_Liberty__ast_Highlights_HIDE_HIGHLIGHTS
[Time] 0:36
Intro. Truth: How do we know what we know is true? How do we know what we believe to be true is actually true when it comes to economics? Can economics make any claim to being a science. Couch of economic psychoanalysis with bias therapist, Robin Hanson. Monolog. Podcast with David Henderson, conversation about why economists disagree. Making fun of economists. Response: Well, actually the agreement's bigger than you think: micro, incentives, policies: minimum wage, tariffs. What about the areas where we disagree? Response: our studies, data, evidence are better. Robert Frank podcast. More likely to argue that competition will lead to a certain result vs. arguing price discrimination. U. of Chicago, competition vs. imperfect competition. What's the evidence either way? Ian Ayres podcast. Not enough statistical analysis, should use it more. John Lott example, handguns and crime: possibility that citizen has concealed handgun deters criminals. Lo-Jack, device to help you find your car. Ayres and Lott disagree. Why do we accept some empirical work and not others? Ian says: Give me an example of an empirical study that forced you to change your view? Hard to think of a lot of them. Can you think of a sophisticated empirical study, two-stage least squares, instrumental variables, as opposed to facts? Not going to argue that facts, data, don't matter, but that sophisticated empirical analysis is not scientist, but scientism, faith-based economics. Leamer podcast. Any examples of consensus in the field of economics vs. a study that changed that consensus view? Abortion legalization reducing crime study did that somewhat; it's since been rejected. Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, scholarship, people forced to confront it. Irony: not sophisticated statistical analysis; and it's in macro, the area where people have no consensus. In microeconomics, hard to find examples where studies changed people's minds. Minimum wage: dozens of studies show minimum wage hurts poor people and minorities. Recent years, study by David Card shows minimum wage increases employment. People who liked the minimum wage latched onto that study. But that's one study, vs. 40 or 80 to the contrary. Not good argument, that you have more studies. Maybe Card's study is really the right one. Or maybe all of the studies are flawed. Trying to tease out one policy out of many. Unemployment is low, so obviously minimum wages have an effect, vs. lots of policies at once. Why would you ever be confident enough that you could tease out one thing? Regression tries to hold one thing constant; surely can't control for everything.
Roberts (and Hanson) on Truth and Economics | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty