1 thought on “Edward Leamer for Nobel

  1. Interesting and worthwhile interview and noble and valiant article.

    “Edward Leamer emphasizes to economists the uncertainty that we face and the humility with which we should make our claims. “

    Definitely something to recognize in this age of arrogant nudgers and Pigouvian taxers operating with all the nuance of monkeys flinging poo.

    His critiques of the generalizability of natural experiments and related extrapolations are worthy of more widespread consideration with respect to randomized control trials. Finding a remote African tribe that the economist considers to have made suboptimal use of fertilizer in an RCT, or, small Chinese rice paddies that the economist imagines could stand to be more densely planted are not really compelling reasons for the current consensus among economists that the farmers of the world ought be subject to a U.N. Agricultural Practices Oversight Agency replete with functionaries to manage every farmer on the planet’s daily activities and decisions.

    Dr Kling writes with respect to the newer experimental approaches “In less ideal situations where assignment is random conditional on controls, the selection of such controls is at least limited to those that are plausibly related to assignment, mitigating the impact of search.” Yet one must wonder whether this observation is more a reflection of his generous nature than of reality. Even in RCTs enormous quantities of dependent variable data is collected and can be expressed with a wide degree of latitude, such that one might well wonder if specification search problems have been back-ended. And even absent such concerns, we might wonder how well causality is inferred: see the “magic dirt” literature by leading Raj Chetty studies scholar Steve Sailer. Thus there may be an even stronger case in support of Leamer than Dr Kling may be willing to admit.

    I don’t dispute Dr Kling’s nomination in the least, yet, it would be helpful to not just the field of economics but to human flourishing as well to to recognize success in actual praxis with substantively consequences for human flourishing. For example, Paulo Guedes, Economy Minister of Brazil whose work has contributed to substantial economic reforms.

Comments are closed.