How to See Past the Economic Smoke and Mirrors

Everyone’s got an opinion about economics. In the punditocracy, in the blogosphere. Wherever you look you see differing views about how we really ought to approach economic policy. 

The problem, as Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman points out in the video below, is that “it’s getting harder and harder to cut through what’s just talk and what’s actually supported by empirical evidence.” 

A lot of the research we see today is not actually reviewed by anybody, Altman says. “Not very many people check through it to see whether it’s genuinely rigorous.  This makes it easier, he says, “for people to continue pushing old ideas that really ought to have been put to bed by now.”

Fortunately, there is a remedy. 

Watch the video here:

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