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This is not true. I've been through an economics program and a lot of theories have empirical data to support them. Of course it's much harder to prove there is
by cjblomqvist 7y ago
This is not true. I've been through an economics program and a lot of theories have empirical data to support them. Of course it's much harder to prove there is causation and not only correlation (and all that that entails), but that's part of being a topic which to a large extent deal with social phenomena (people).
Can't dig up anything now but a lot of phenomena in papers (though of course far from all /majority) do or reference some sort of quantitative research).
- soVeryTired 7y agoMeh. The standard of "support" is pretty low. I spent a lot of time looking through the literature for empirical support for 1/ the Philips curve, and 2/ gravity models of trade. I looked for the first out of personal interest, and for the second because economists often claim that gravity models are well-supported. Where empirical studies were actually available, they usually had large numbers of parameters, they did not test on diverse datasets (e.g. Philips curves across different economies), and they never considered an alternative hypothesis or simple baseline.
- fujimotos 7y agoIndeed. Even within a single economy, plotting a scatter plot for enough data points (e.g. 25 years) makes Philips curves just broken. It was a gong moment for me when I came across a short passage discussing its foundedness. * Freedman, Pisani and Purves Statistics, 4th edition (p153)