I recently posted a detailed article in response to Raj Chetty’s lament that scientists make fun of economics’ pretense to science.
The thrust of my article was that the problem was not that economics was inherently incapable of becoming more scientific. The problem was that so many economists wear ideological blinders that recurrently cause them to perform a parody of the scientific method.
Chetty claimed that economists who are “testing precise hypotheses” in quantitative studies that exploit natural experiments are (finally, in 2013) “transforming economics into a field firmly grounded in fact.” Chetty’s metaphor is that economics is like epidemiology. (One assumes that his column is posted in the CDC’s common areas for the general amusement of epidemiologists.)
