Peter Dorman writes,

what passes for empiricism in economics at present is often deficient in an empiricist, self-critical spirit and methodology. At the same time, the debates over topics like the minimum wage, the effects of charter schools on educational outcomes and the like are on a vastly higher plane when they are about data sets and analytical assumptions than the certitude of my unquestioned beliefs against the certitude of yours. It’s also a cheap and not altogether forthcoming dodge to respond to econometric disputes with a flip “There is never a clean empirical test that ultimately settles these issues.” (Roberts) That’s a epistemology.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

Adam Ozimek writes,

Calls for skepticism of empirical economists also need to be matched with “compared to what?” Often those arguing for more humility about empiricism aren’t actually embracing humility, but instead are making space for their own narratives that are no less humble. For example, Russ says he doesn’t know how many jobs NAFTA has created or destroyed because “thousands and thousands of jobs are created every month and it is very difficult, perhaps impossible to know which ones are related to NAFTA.” Certainly, humility with regard to this question is useful. But then at the end of that paragraph Russ tells us he believes “trade neither destroyed nor created jobs on net.” Zero is not the same as “I don’t know,” nor is it necessarily any more humble than some specific estimate with wide confidence intervals.

…Economists do disagree on whether the direct effect of immigrants on native wages is a small positive or small negative. But they agree it is small. It’s easy to take this conclusion for granted as somehow common sense. But the truth is that, in the absence of the empiricism, the claim that immigration has held back wages by 20% for everyone would be much harder to argue against.

Noah Smith adds,

Theories can be wrong, stylized facts can be illusions, and empirical studies can lack external validity. But where does casual intuition even come from? It comes from a mix of half-remembered theory, half-remembered stylized facts, received wisdom, personal anecdotal experience, and political ideology. In other words, it’s a combination of A) low-quality, adulterated versions of the other approaches, and B) motivated reasoning.

If we care about accurate predictions, motivated reasoning is our enemy. And why use low-quality, adulterated versions of theory and empirics when you can use the real things?

Pointers from Tyler Cowen, who adds

A lot of the bias in empirical methods comes simply from which questions are asked/answered.

I say “amen” to that. For example, in the health care policy debate, the empiricists at CBO are telling us how many people would “lose” their health insurance under the GOP proposal. If you want to, you can question the CBO’s empirical estimates (their forecasts for Obamacare were, in the words of Avik Roy, “way off”). But that is not where I think the debate should go.

Instead, I think we ought to be talking about the real meaning of “insurance” in the context of health care. I think we ought to talk about the pros and cons of individuals having less “coverage” and making their own decisions about medical procedures with high costs and low benefits vs. having more “coverage” but subject to restrictions placed on them by bureaucrats. I think we ought to be talking about the issue that Timothy Taylor raised the other day, namely, should we be spending less on medical services and more on other things that are conducive to better health. (Note that Taylor’s post is grounded in formal empiricism.)

Perhaps we ought to be listening to Dierdre McCloskey’s view that economics is a discipline that uses rhetoric. I think that Russ Roberts and I would complain about the pseudo-scientific rhetoric that gets used.

Noah Smith’s use of the rhetorical phrase “the real things” is an example of the sort of language that lacks humility. It implies that there is a great distance between casual observation combined with theoretical introspection on the one hand and formal empirical work on the other, with the implication that the latter dominates the former. I would say that in some cases it is the former that is unreliable and in other cases it is the latter.

I hope that we can all agree that a lack of humility consists of pretending to know something for certain when it is in fact doubtful. We can then argue about what sort of approaches to economics are conducive to humility or a lack thereof.

Again, I have a longer essay on this topic, but it will not appear until this summer.