And yet you're failing at a key scientific principle, which is looking for alternative hypotheses to explain what you're seeing :) Many of the commonly-cited e

And yet you're failing at a key scientific principle, which is looking for alternative hypotheses to explain what you're seeing :) Many of the commonly-cited examples tend to pick situations which are amenable to lots of explanations. To take your example of the early US: was it low taxes and light regulation? Was it the presence of massive amounts of land and natural resources essentially free for the taking (once the natives had been suitably subdued)? Was it the jump from agrarian to industrial economy? How much of a role was played by the lack of regulation on things like owning other people and forcing them to work for you? Similarly, it's difficult to work only from short-term examples; Ireland had a great boom, yes, but they also got a real-estate bubble and a banking crisis -- both of which are pretty clearly related in some way to the tax/regulation situation -- and that's not so great for the long-term. It's also important to consider the historical context. Rapid industrialization has almost always resulted in massive growth, for example, but at unimaginable human cost. Whether we look at starvation and accidental and deliberate deaths as a result of a five-year plan or the Great Leap Forward, or starvation and accidental and deliberate deaths during the Western industrial revolution, we find that this growth is not always a uniformly good thing. Yet, when approaching from a framework that values only numbers like GDP, we don't see those costs. If you want a scientific approach, you have to be considering all of these things, and more :)