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I see some possibilities to test hypotheses like "$MEASURE will achieve $GOAL" a) Gather historical data where $MEASURE was attempted and see whether $GOAL was
by limmeau 17y ago
I see some possibilities to test hypotheses like "$MEASURE will achieve $GOAL"
a) Gather historical data where $MEASURE was attempted and see whether $GOAL was reached. This can give results like "$MEASURE is positively correlated with achieving $GOAL".
b) Test it on a smaller scale. Instead of reforming the entire health-care system, search for something small but similar to reform.
c) simulate. Build a simulation of economic subjects and, before simulating the Friedman health-care reform, test it on past scenarios whose outcome is known.
- amalcon 17y agoThese usually just result in people picking holes in the dataset/experiment/simulation -- and rightly so; circumstances change too quickly for historical data to be much use, simulations necessarily have some severe assumptions, and small-scale tests don't simulate macroeconomic effects very well. This is the reason that I've long classified macroeconomics in with religion: they're both very influential ideas, but neither are really based on any evidence.
- limmeau 17y agoHmm yes... fairly quickly, one runs out of large rich countries at the beginnings of twenty-first centuries to draw parallels from. I liked A Mind Forever Voyaging, though, which is about an attempt to do c) properly.