Must-read: Adam Ozimek: “Can Economics Change Your Mind?”

Must-Read: Adam Ozimek: Can Economics Change Your Mind?: “Work from David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson has convinced me that in some local areas…

…the job losses from free trade can be substantial, and that these communities have been slower to adjust than I expected…. Mark Zandi… tells me the paper ‘Potential Output and Recessions: Are We Fooling Ourselves?’ by Robert Martin, Teyanna Munyan, and Beth Anne Wilson changed his mind recently… that recessions tend to have a permanent negative effect on output…. Raj Chetty and John Friedman were skeptical of standardized test-based measures of teacher performance, and they set off to do research… their evidence convinced them they were wrong…. Amy Finkelstein… [found] people changed behavior and used less healthcare when they moved from geographies where people on average spend a lot on healthcare to places with low spending…. Narayana Kocherlakota spent three years at the head of the Minneapolis Fed criticizing monetary policy as risking out-of-control inflation and unlikely to help the economy. Then in 2012, he made an about face, telling the New York Times that ‘a wave of research gradually convinced him that he was wrong.’… And some even take the step of repudiating their own earlier work…. Emily Oster… ‘Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China,’ with an abstract that concludes ‘…hepatitis B cannot explain skewed sex ratios in China, and the conclusions about this in Oster (2005) were incorrect’…