No I don't want to read through that crap anymore, I had enough in grad school helping econ friends. What I'm talking about is that they always make a bunch of

No I don't want to read through that crap anymore, I had enough in grad school helping econ friends. What I'm talking about is that they always make a bunch of simplifying assumptions about the world and then fit their model and analyze. But what they almost never do is seriously justify the assumptions. One popular paper is to do "Assuming the world follows theory X, we propose this tweaked version of model Y from paper Z and show how it better predicts this dataset of 600 points from the world bank." I knew numerous people in grad school who played that game. There is no way the tiny little dataset they had could justify any of this, but that's what publishes in econ. And if you ask them about this, they will tell you that they only had this tiny little dataset because that's all that is publicly available and so on. That's fair, but also gives them a huge dodge to hide behind. That's what I saw of the field and I came away thinking that it stank.