Conversations with Tyler

 People this is what I have to put up with! What follows below is verbatim.

TC:  Lonzo Ball really good! Pelicans could be decent if they make Zion the #3 option.

Angus: So far this year Lonzo is at 11 ppg, 4.6 assists, 2.3 turnovers. His PER is 10. Zion's is 24. Ingram 20. Lonzo is shooting 38.8 from the field, 30.1 from 3 and  58.3 on free throws. His career shooting numbers are about the same as that.  So, that's the opposite of good.

TC: You are like those people who do not wish to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine!

Angus: If he was 56% effective, I would definitely approve him.

TC: Just don't let anyone over 60 years of age watch him play.

F**K, Marry, Kill

 I'm really exhausted by this quixotic attempt at the elevation of (price) theory. As Boettke, Coyne and Leeson (2003) themselves point out, theory has evolved to the point where any proposition is provable, making good empirical work more important than ever.

Take the minimum wage for example. There's the basic supply and demand model that says one thing and there are monopsony and other models that say something else. IT'S AN EMPIRICAL QUESTION!

In the absence of experiments, modern methods that try to get at identifying causal effects are super-important.

If your theory is so right, you should be able to find empirical support in models using the best available methods for the problem.

None of this is to say that empirical work doesn't suffer from file drawer bias or p-hacking, or cannot be influenced by the ideology of the researcher. Of course it can. BUT SO CAN THEORY!!

I really feel like to be a scientist, you have to have at least some tiny part of your brain be willing to consider the possibility that your preferred theory may be wrong.

5 years ago I would have said that raising the minimum wage was a laughably horrible way to try and help people, but today I'm not so sure how bad it really is. Thanks to the research of Dube and company.