Economic ‘natural experiments’ depend on prior policy programs, not nature

Evidence

What happens when caged economics meets economics in the wild? One discovers that the world outside is not really a wilderness; it is more like a reservation. This discovery should not be surprising. As we have stated, a “natural experiment” in economics is not an experiment that takes place in nature. It is an experiment that typically takes advantage of certain programs, policies, or political-economic processes that have arranged the sociotechnical world in a way that makes experimentation possible. The investigator does not control these wider experiments, but he or she relies on them. Although the forms of this reliance will be different in different cases, the possibility of economic experimentation depends on the larger programs, which constitute what we call the economy. The experiment works on prior experiments. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1985

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that experimentation ‘works on prior experiments’ suggests a recursive layering of policy intervention worth tracing — how many generations deep do these accumulated experiments run in a place like Chile or Peru?
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberal policy experiments are preconditions that make economic research findings possible — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1955; Natural experiments use policy changes to produce quasi-random variation in data — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1936; Economists’ natural experiments depend on infrastructure built by real-world projects — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1940 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Economists concede that so-called natural experiments are rarely truly natural. #corroborates (0.92) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2009
• Prior experiments determine which economic facts even become available and plausible #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1986
• Neoliberal policies produced experiments whose results fed yet more neoliberal projects #exemplifies (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1983
• Economic abstractions are historically determined, not universal or extra-historical #corroborates (0.75)
• Natural experimental conditions allow rigorous causal tests of media effects #contradicts (0.75)
• Economic laws of tendency operate historicistly, not as naturalistic determinisms. #corroborates (0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1422