Most disciplines evolved in the last 40 years (looking at you psychiatry), but economics has changed rather drastically. Methods for testing theory back then we

Most disciplines evolved in the last 40 years (looking at you psychiatry), but economics has changed rather drastically. Methods for testing theory back then were Bad. Like, really bad. Ed Leamer's 1983 paper on this (http://www.econ.ucla.edu/workingpapers/wp239.pdf http://www.econ.ucla.edu/workingpapers/wp239.pdf) is a good read if you want the details. Beginning in the late 80s, there was a movement toward study design and credible identification. Software like Stata (and nowadays there's R, julia and python) started lowering the costs of doing data-intensive work. The 90s and 00s are full of really interesting papers pushing the frontier on what could be done do gather evidence of causality: Angrist and Lavy in 1999 using Maimonedes Rules and RDDs to estimate class-size effects, Hoxby 2000 using rivers and county borders as exogenous variation on public school competition, Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson 2001 using colonizer death rates to estimate long-term effects of colonization. The discipline has evolved and so has our understanding of minimum wages (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/3/1405/5484905 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/3/1405/5484905), gun violence (https://www.nber.org/papers/w23510 https://www.nber.org/papers/w23510) and nation-building (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dell/files/paper_combined.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dell/files/paper_combined....). Pretty sure Railway Economics has changed too.