Disappointment is one thing. If you ignore and downplay some of the "boycott" and "cancel" comments on this post, you're just hiding your head in the sand about the lunacy.

GOG is still one of the good ones, if not best ones. Don't delude yourselves with your better-than-thou unplaced arrogance.

As if you all were immune to mistakes and the occasional tripping 🙄...

You guys are fanatics if this turns you away from GOG, while other stores are egregiously using an insane amount of AI stuff and you don't bat an eye.

Cultists.

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.

If they make those assumptions, they are not economists, they are politicians. Learning to distinguish the difference is the same skillset boomers need to pick up on in relation to real images and AI generation... Clearly you lack in that department.

Funnily enough labour economics was taught as an elective at my undergrad in Utrecht University. 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.

You're so incredibly dumb, the flailing is hilarious. You wouldn't pass micro I, let alone macro.