Economists like to argue about anything and everything - but on Monday they agreed for once: to award the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens is a spot on.
Two great services make the three North Americans beyond any doubt in the professional world.
First of all, they have opened their eyes to the fact that the world has many natural experiments in store that make it possible to identify cause-effect relationships.
The most famous example: One American state introduces the minimum wage, another does not - is unemployment skyrocketing in the first state?
The data that Card evaluated in the early 1990s, surprisingly, answered the question with no.
Second, the microeconomists have identified and refined procedures that make it possible in the first place to find out what the cause of a development is from a mass of data.
Since then, economists have run less of a risk of being exposed to pseudo-causalities.
In terms of content, the researchers' statements about the labor market, migration and education fit the left-liberal zeitgeist. But it would be absurd to assume that this was the main reason why they won the highest award. If you want to interpret the selection politically, then it is like this: At a time when people like to trumpet unproven theses and spread “fake news” on social networks, three researchers who are searching for the truth are moving into the limelight. With them, the facts come first and then the strong statements.
With all the applause for the award winners, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that empirical research results are not universally valid, but always only pieces of the mosaic for the overall picture.
The fact that the minimum wage does not destroy jobs under certain conditions does not mean, for example, that it has to be the same when the economy is poor and hourly wages are high.
It is to the credit of the researchers that they themselves warn against such simplifications.