[gmtx725]

It's not that simplistic, it's not a conspiracy it's a self-selecting self-replicating system.

How do economics professors get hired? By impressing other economics professors. And by having the power to win funding for the department. Who are the people that tend to fit those criteria? Mostly, those who already agree with the existing establishment, and those who already have views amenable to the well-resourced bodies that distribute funding.

[huitzitziltzin]

> How do economics professors get hired? By impressing other economics professors.

This claim is true.

> Who are the people that tend to fit those criteria? Mostly, those who already agree with the existing establishment

This claim is false. If you can empirically support a result which shows that something most other economists believe is likely false and can do so convincingly, you can write your ticket to any department in the country. Some of the most successful graduate students every year do things like this (not all, because it's very hard to do). But the profession is 100% open to this kind of work.

> And by having the power to win funding for the department.

This demonstrates a misunderstanding of how economics departments are funded. Grant funding is a very small part of the departmental budget everywhere. We are not (to take an example where department funding does depend on grants) health policy departments.

[gmtx725]

> This claim is false. If you can empirically support a result which shows that something most other economists believe is likely false and can do so convincingly

It's almost impossible to do that though isn't it? Economics isn't a hard science, it's not like you can run RCTs or experiments. And all actually-existing economic systems are situated within an actually-existing political, social and historical context, meaning we only ever observe a tiny fraction of the possible universe of economic systems. There is no possibility to explore counterfactuals.

> This demonstrates a misunderstanding of how economics departments are funded. Grant funding is a very small part of the departmental budget everywhere

I never mentioned grants, departments still have to be funded somehow, whatever that process is, it will introduce selection biases.

[huitzitziltzin]

> It's almost impossible to do that though isn't it?

Not at all. It IS hard, but that's because research is hard. If it were possible to easily show widely-held beliefs to be wrong, someone would have done it already. (No different from any other scientific field!) But it does happen.

>Economics isn't a hard science, it's not like you can run RCTs or experiments.

Also wrong. You can in many areas. Indeed, there is a gigantic literature on field experiments, and the whole field of development economics runs on RCTs. In macro it is difficult, because no one is going to give you a whole economy to play with, but lab experiments in macro exist. Most empirical work in macro is not based on experiments.

But that does not make it impossible to learn anything, it just makes it hard. Indeed, that is why we have spent years developing methods to solve this problem, then more years criticizing and refining our own methods. That process will never end.

> And all actually-existing economic systems are situated within an actually-existing political, social and historical context, meaning we only ever observe a tiny fraction of the possible universe of economic systems. There is no possibility to explore counterfactuals.

Again, this is what makes it hard. It is not impossible. To answer certain questions for certain models may be impossible b/c there is no way to identify the parameters in question empirically.

You make these claims like it makes our whole enterprise worthless or impossible. We have taken it as a challenge to attempt to develop interesting methods to answer hard questions.

Exploring unseen counterfactuals on the basis of parameters estimated from models given existing data is literally my bread and butter EVERY day (I am not a macroeconomist, but I am an economist). And it is the bread and butter of many of us.

Give us some credit, an overwhelming majority of us are not conservative ideologues. And if you really want to know how it works, HOW we learn things from data (in macro and elsewhere) I can provide references.