"The law of supply and demand" is never going to fit everything the way the law of gravity does. It's a rough guideline that applies to artificial models better

"The law of supply and demand" is never going to fit everything the way the law of gravity does. It's a rough guideline that applies to artificial models better than it does to the real world. It seems like economists need to admit it when a minimum wage law don't have the effect they think it "should" instead of stubbornly insisting they're right. However, you can tell a "journalist" wrote this... >Isaiah Andrews, one of these new ‘empiricists’, won the 2021 John Bates Clark Medal – the most distinguished economics prize in the United States. Andrews has worked on the problem of publication bias – whereby research that confirmed prior beliefs could have a better chance of being accepted by academic journals I don't see what this has to do with supply & demand. "Confirmation bias" is more of a social science study area, not economics. > In 2020, the UK government appointed Mark Carney – a former governor at the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England – as climate change adviser. Carney was quick to declare the problem to be essentially a mispricing of the cost of emitting carbon. Neither Sunstein nor Carney are experts in climate economics, let alone climate change. Whatever "climate economics" is and how it differs from just "economics." > The problem is one I call ‘free lunch thinking’. Milton Friedman popularised the saying that there was ‘no such thing as a free lunch’, yet his worldview was that, if government just stepped back – didn’t spend money solving problems, didn’t trouble itself with regulation, and left all the messy decisions around how to organise society to the ‘market’ – things would hum along and we’d all get richer magically. That sounds a lot like a free lunch.. [italics added] No, it's not "free lunch thinking." It's describing how laws work. It's not magic if you turn on the burner under the teakettle and the water gets hot. > Yet there is no reason why adhering to the scientific method of basing conclusions and world views on observable facts should be more challenging in economics than in physics. Except that the incentives are against it. If you have a dogmatic neoclassical view of how the world works, you’ll always have a solution to the economic problem of the day. Actually, there IS a reason: in physics you can do experiments quite easily, and in the social sciences and economics, you can't. Thus Freakonomics and successor books focus on "natural experiments," like the two school districts in Canada whose boundaries seem to be randomly drawn. Minimum wage increases in one state or city are not a natural experiment.