This all is off-topic, and I'd happily support a mod purging any mention of econ from this thread. However, while it's here, I'm not keen to let my field's name be dragged through the mud to tar empiricism.
Science, yes. But is science the be all and end all? And these studies are hardly blind are they? If the scientist wants it to be true that minimum wage is 'non-disemploying' then that is what they'll find
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This sort of banal, handwaving skepticism is sadly a commonality in the discussion of economics. Happily it is wrong, at least for the most part. Although a meaningful influence of authorial bias does exist - see also, the continued employment of David Neumark - the premise that it dominates the output of this field (or any other field of science) is difficult to reconcile with the reversals of consensus which new empirical work have produced.
At one point, a minority of economists argued in favour of minimum wages even as a net gain for low-skilled workers - now it would be controversial to assert that a "moderate" minimum wage would even be disemploying, let alone a net decrease in welfare for low-skilled workers. How do we get from point A to point B on this? The continual refinement of our understanding and theory via empirical work.
Should government policy be driven by these 'scientific' observations? I believe that Michael Gove's famous "Britons have had enough of experts..." was referring to the responsibility for political decisions being conveniently offloaded onto such people (having picked the right 'expert' of course).
I suppose if you assume that there is an "expert" for any preferred policy agenda and that there is no insight to be gained from the sciences, then you might question the purpose of scientific guidance of policy. This is at odds with the consensus that exists within economics on many salient points for policy crafting and implementation, however - while normative goals (and thus optimal policy) vary considerably, the actual outcomes and operation of policy are much less in contention among real experts, and well that it is, otherwise not only could we not agree on what we should do, we'd disagree on what we were doing, had done, and could do. Certainly, it often plays to the advantage of a politician to imply an ambiguity among the experts on a topic - most often if their proposed solution isn't even ideal for their espoused ends - but this doesn't create a real ambiguity within the field.
Perhaps Britons have also had enough of experts on the origins and impacts of climatic change, should we divorce policy from 'scientific observations' on those subjects as well?
I am persuaded by Nassim Taleb when he says that a taxi driver is a true expert in his trade, but there is no such thing as a truly expert economist because they are dabbling in something that cannot be learned on a course or improved by practice. And I think common sense suggests that it is *way* beyond understanding by low level empirical observation.
Taleb's apparent passion since his commercial success has been pontificating pseudophilosophically on Twitter, so I'm not surprised he said that. He particularly seems to have some sort of bone to pick with economics - it might help if he took some time to look into the field he's criticizing. But I suppose the purpose is the opportunity to sound profound and insightful, and that's not limited by the facts.
Well, this conversation sure is moving quickly away from speaker designs into vague circular arguments.
From what I have seen of his posting, this appears to be Cosmik's primary purpose in posting on this forum.