Keep in mind that mainstream economists cling to their gods, guns and economic models because, as they insist, math makes economics a science like physics. Yet with all of the veneration of the math and statistics, I have seen no econometric study such as this one change anyone’s mind or change mainstream economics in my 40 years of watching the game. The usual suspects in economics greeted the study in the same old way they have met with similar studies for the past half century: the right (free market) celebrated and the left (socialists) poo-pooed it.
No one sees such behavior in the truly math oriented sciences such as physics. There aren’t five schools of physics that dispute gravity or the speed of light as there are five different schools of macroeconomics. But why aren’t the econometric analyses of economic data more convincing? The problem lies with the subject matter. Physics is child’s play compared to economics because gravity and light and electrons always act the same way under similar circumstances. Humans, the subject of economics, don’t. And the number of relevant variables in a physics problem is small compared to those in economics, not to mention the complex interactions.
