You're asking after 'experimental validation' but vague on detail. It's a difficult topic. Economics is not a sandbox. For macroeconomic topics, you can't creat

You're asking after 'experimental validation' but vague on detail. It's a difficult topic. Economics is not a sandbox. For macroeconomic topics, you can't create a cluster of equal samples and then test them. And where you have tools to predict what will happen, you may be changing the future due to the feedback loop. If somebody writes a paper demonstrating that a market will go up over a certain period, they may influence readers and cause the market to go up sooner. Soros discusses this feedback loop at length in _ The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means_, which is a book about his philosophy dressed up to sell copies in the wake of the crisis. The issue of scientific approaches to testing economic theories is a major fault-line within economics. Me, I doubt that the unfettered free market economy can deliver what is promised. What promise, and by whom? The alternative to a free market is the various degrees of intervention that are making it not-free. Often, this means government interference. Tariffs and other forms of pork-barreling. It was a major achievement for humans to reach a point where we could isolate power structures from trade. We've since moved a long way from it. The free market is cheap to maintain, simple, scalable, transparent and - by definition - free of political interference. It is not a system, it is an absence of system. It doesn't make promises. Without better understanding, we will continue to fly blind, waste resources, and make sub-optimal decisions. This will always happen. You can't predict the future reliably, and where you do, you may change it. It's a dud goal to want to create super-hacker economists who knowingly steer the economy. The best we can do is to create simple, well-understood circumstances that everyone knows, and where everyone is subject to the same rules.