Would it really kill economists to stick some reference to effect size in the abstracts of these things? If this were a clinical trial, and the authors were like “hey, good news, napoleolimumab increases modernization, now FDA-approved for your unsightly problems with Prussian stagnation” they’d have the common decency to say “10 years of french reforms increases the primary endpoint of urbanization in 1900 by 9% from 41% to 50%” But instead i had to hunt through the text for it like a goddamn animal (page 23, if you care. They also have a point estimate of 36% GDP increase.
But now that they forced me to go through the paper, some not-terribly informed thoughts:
1. I have the usual concerns about econ research—were any of these analyses pre-specified? How many different analyses were tried before they went with this one, etc.
2. If I am reading this correctly, by 1850 no changes are seen. So all the positive effect of the new institutions is from 1850-1900. Interesting.
3. Riffing on ‘2’—maybe this can be spun as another example of “industrialization changes everything” or “conservatism is a better default in the absence of massive scientific/technological change.” Blowing up institutions in 700 AD does you no good, because there’s no innovation to take advantage of, you just get chaos. Blowing up institutions in 1800 AD helps, because it enables social shifts to take advantage of new modes of production.
4. And just for honesty: my prediction was “can’t discern an obvious effect” (which in retrospect was idiotic given that if it were a null effect it never would have been published)
In other words, this is chasing noise, zero-value research. Daron Amoglu is the most-cited economist in the world. His speciality is development economics. One of the foundational axioms is that historical contigencies have large effects on economic development decades or centuries later. This is a highly problematic assumption, one I think is mostly wrong. However, it is a treasure trove for telling ‘interesting stories’.
All these questions are implictly highly politicized. There is a pretension that economists are doing value-free research. This is a good ideal but very difficult; in practice there is an enormous incentive to p-hack noise into providing fodder for socially-approved stories.
My take-away message:
You cannot trust 99% of social science research &Almost all social science researchers are highly sophisticated frauds
2. All big claims about the social world are so highly correlated with an implicit background worldview that is highly politicized.
3. Never trust anything in a social science paper that you have not personally checked.
Industrialization clearly doesn’t change everything here. British political reform cleanly precedes the industrial revolution; US and French revolutions are post-British IR and may have been affected by it some, but before those countries really industrialized.
Is it possible that political reform may have a causal influence on economic outcomes? Sure.
Does this study prove and—more importantly- rigorously quantify this influence? No.
The statistics are simply not powerful enough to yield such strong conclusions.
The effect size is small, there is clear garden-of-forking-paths going on (only finding a real effect on urbanization), one has to mediate for a simple west-east axis. It is also highly suspicious that the effect only starts to take effect after 1850. etc etc etc
This could be pure noise. The study does not adequately reject the null hypothesis.
I am quoting notJosephConrad :
In other words, this is chasing noise, zero-value research. Daron Amoglu is the most-cited economist in the world. His speciality is development economics. One of the foundational axioms is that historical contigencies have large effects on economic development decades or centuries later. This is a highly problematic assumption, one I think is mostly wrong. However, it is a treasure trove for telling ‘interesting stories’.
All these questions are implictly highly politicized. There is a pretension that economists are doing value-free research. This is a good ideal but very difficult; in practice there is an enormous incentive to p-hack noise into providing fodder for socially-approved stories.
My take-away message:
You cannot trust 99% of social science research &Almost all social science researchers are highly sophisticated frauds
2. All big claims about the social world are so highly correlated with an implicit background worldview that is highly politicized.
3. Never trust anything in a social science paper that you have not personally checked.
Industrialization clearly doesn’t change everything here. British political reform cleanly precedes the industrial revolution; US and French revolutions are post-British IR and may have been affected by it some, but before those countries really industrialized.
Is it possible that political reform may have a causal influence on economic outcomes? Sure.
Does this study prove and—more importantly- rigorously quantify this influence? No.
The statistics are simply not powerful enough to yield such strong conclusions.
The effect size is small, there is clear garden-of-forking-paths going on (only finding a real effect on urbanization), one has to mediate for a simple west-east axis. It is also highly suspicious that the effect only starts to take effect after 1850. etc etc etc
This could be pure noise. The study does not adequately reject the null hypothesis.
Does this study prove it? Maybe not. But if there are confounding effects, industrialization ain’t it.