Bloomberg har en intressant artikel, Business Is Booming in Empirical Economics, av Betsey Stevenson och Justin Wolfers om hur lätt det har blivit att samla in och analysera människors faktiska val. Tack vare den billiga datakraften och ett kommersiellt övervakningssamhälle kan ekonomer börja bygga modeller på empiri snarare än teori.
“The incursions of economists into new areas have not always been welcomed by our sister social sciences. But it has been a two-way street: Sociology, political science and psychology have come to play an important role in economic analysis — as the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Kahneman, a psychologist, demonstrates.
Ours is a different story. Technological change has brought opportunities to do economics in a way that our predecessors could only have dreamed about. Those opportunities have, in turn, yielded a field that is more connected to reality. Our hope is that these insights will improve our understanding of the economy and give us a better shot at avoiding the next crisis.”