Will Economics Become an Experimental Science?

Will Economics Become an Experimental Science?

Experimental Economics: Science or What?

Do we want experimental economics to evolve into a genuine science? This paper uses the literature on inequity aversion as a case study in warning that we are at risk of losing the respect of other scientific disciplines if we continue to accept the wide claims about human behavior that are currently being advanced without examining either the data from which the claims are supposedly derived o...

Will direct laryngoscopy become an extinct skill?

Is economics an empirical science? If not, can it become one?

Today’s mainstream economics, embodied in Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models, cannot be considered an empirical science in the modern sense of the term: it is not based on empirical data, is not descriptive of the real-world economy, and has little forecasting power. In this paper, I begin with a review of the weaknesses of neoclassical economic theory and argue for a truly sc...

How Books Will Become Machines

We shape our tools and they shape us in return. Trapped in an invisible technological loop, we underestimate the pervasive impact of the tools we use, ignorant of the fact that each technological transition can change the way we act, feel or think. Worse, our understanding of technological evolutionary dynamics is still in its infancy. We are missing the equivalent of a Darwinian Theory of Evol...