Something that is harder

Steven Levitt, in my opinion, sided with Angus Deaton on the recent debate on the direction of development economics. I like what he said here:

Given a question, of course you want a randomized experiment to give you the best answer possible. What I think has happened too much in economics recently is that the availability of experiments has trumped the asking of good questions. Or, put another way, anyone can do program evaluations based on true randomization, so why should some of the world’s best economists be devoting so much of their time to such exercises?

The great economists should be trying to do something that is harder.

Mahir and I always thought about doing a theoretical model to answer an important question, as opposed to running a pure empirical project. To be fair, not everyone can publish a nicely thought-after and executed paper in a decent journal. It takes hard working and lots of investment of time and resources. But our reasoning is closer to what Levitt said. We want to try something that is harder.

A side note: Levitt's Freaknomics, unfortunately, is often credited with helping the irreversible trend of economic research he himself is worried about here.

(Picture: Angus Deaton through NBER)