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Cake day: January 26th, 2026

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  • Minorities are not always absolute. You can’t, in good faith, say that Trump voters (who got him ELECTED for fuck’s sake) and who currently poll him at 41+% count as a “minority” the same way any other “minority” exists, such as LGBT at 15ish %. You’re arguing in such bad faith that it’s actually ridiculous. Typical American mindset.













  • Yes, we do run RCTs. There are entire branches of economics that can be entirely controlled for, double-blind and randomized. For example microeconomic theory and game theory.

    Yes, there are fields that get unethical to experiment under as you scale things up (think macroeconomics), which is why we have famous papers like The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation - AJR.

    Natural experiments are used all the time in many fields, especially the social sciences, for ethicality. That doesn’t make them less valuable, as they test for things you would have never gotten to test for through RCTs, and don’t serve as a “crutch” due to the lack of RCTs. They serve different purposes.

    And that’s just one aspect people get wrong, economics isn’t all about straight lines like another (vehemently wrong) commenter was saying. It’s also not about politics, even though the economics of politics are taught conceptually. At least in my European university, no one forced ideology with the study of the median voter theorem or Vickrey auctions, among many other topics.

    Anyway, rant over. This whole post is a rage-bait and people engaging in it are either ignorant of the subject matter (totally fine if you’re willing to learn and accept you’re wrong) or simply rage-baiters themselves.



  • Funnily enough labour economics was taught as an elective at my undergrad in my european uni. This whole post makes me mad considering the amount of work it was getting through that bachelor’s, and especially so when you consider they literally had data science integrated as one of the optional minors… Which I took.

    These people don’t have the slightest clue about economics beyond what they’re taught they manage to learn in highschool, and therefore forecast that pitiful amount of knowledge to an entire empirical field… Probably to make themselves feel better. Human discount model in motion.