metachine

I'm currently marking essays for my post-graduate Research Methods course. The topic for Old Mutual's annual Budget Speech Competition is: "Following the financial crises central banks in many developed economics have adopted unconventional monetary policies. Some seven years later much of this remains in place and has in certain cases been intensified. Do you think that central banks have been correct or are they inadvertently creating the next crises?" This is an extremely important issue if money is important to you or the people you care about. However the word "think" in the question is telling, because there is simply no way of knowing if "central banks have been correct." Jim Manzi's article on What Social Science Does and Doesn't Know is illuminating. The gist of the argument he makes is that, in the absence of some form of 'controlled' experimentation, we cannot identify the effects of macro-economic policies (and...