It Is The Family Table

And now it is in my kitchen.

Accompaniment:

Linkage

"Le bonheur est une idée neuve en Europe. " (Saint-Just, 1794). "Die Zeit des persönlichen Glücks ist vorbei" (Hitler). Extracting a historical happiness index from google books data.

Linkage

Strong results on university participation and ethnicity from the IFS:

... Chinese pupils in the lowest socio-economic quintile group are, on average, more than 10 percentage points more likely to go to university than White British pupils in the highest socio-economic quintile group...
... 34% of Chinese pupils attend one of these selective institutions, higher than the proportion of White British students who go to any university...

This isn't just about Chinese overachievement: White British participation is lower than any other ethnic group, including Black Caribbean.
My best guess as to why would be: migrants are a highly selected bunch. Of course not many of the non-White British in the sample (who were doing their GCSEs in 2007-8) are likely to be immigrants, perhaps not even the majority of them have immigrant parents. Nevertheless, if there are differences in family culture across ethnicities (in the UK) which persist down generations, that might explain what is going on.

In which contemporary empirical social science is explained with MS Paint

I've bashed laboratory experiments in a few posts. Now seems a good time to bash field experiments. With that in mind, below is a scientific diagram of the modal modern empirical paper in a good economics or political science journal.

Here, X is the independent variable. c.e. is the causal effect of the independent variable on Y, the dependent variable. T is a tree.

As you can see, the causal effect is a lightning flash. It is blindingly sharp and crisp. A randomized controlled trial has been implemented at great expense; or, there is a field experiment in which different values of X are randomized across the relevant units; or, the paper argues, at length and convincingly, that the independent variable X was assigned in a way uncorrelated with any other factors affecting the dependent variable – this is a true natural experiment. Or at very least we have a great instrumental variable. The ingenuity and effort spent in getting at real causality in modern social science is inspiring, and it is a very good thing.

When we turn to X and Y, the picture is less encouraging.

X in particular is a mysterious grey cloud. What are its edges, where does it end and where begin? What is in the cloud? How does it link to other clouds, or all they all part of a single cloud system? It is hard to tell.

Y is rather the same. It's certainly something – after all, it has been measured – but it also looks rather blurry and indistinct. Is that grey bit part of it, or its shadow?

Here are some examples:

• I recently saw a presentation examining the effect of church attendance on social preferences and ingroup bias, by running experiments with people before and after church. Much could be, and was, said about the details of this design. (Maybe people after church were hungrier? Do you need a control with people who didn't go to church?) Less discussed was exactly what in church attendance was having the effects. The results were presented as "the effect of church attendance".
  
  In economic theory, the world is traditionally composed of preferences, beliefs and choice sets. That is pretty minimal, and experimental work has shown that other things than these three affect behaviour - say, framing. But to make church attendance a primitive in our social theory seems over the top.
  
  Of course, even if you do want to do this, and think there is such a thing as the effect of church attendance, the experiment was run in a particular year, in two cities of a particular country.
  
  
• Economic history is an obvious target. A well-known paper looks at the effect of the mita institution, a form of forced labour imposed by the Spanish Empire, on contemporary Peru. The effects are identified by exogenous geographical variation, and persist to the present day in terms of underconsumption. There is no way this is not an interesting finding. But what is it a finding of? In one sense, it is the effect of the mita. But now we are back in a world of proper nouns: how do we generalize from this to make future predictions? Alternatively, we could talk about "extractive institutions", leaving us with an awkward identification problem: how do we know when an institution is extractive? (When it thwarts development?)
  
  The same point holds for other papers. Work on the effect of the printing press seems relatively more immune to this critique, because it seems more natural to think of printing presses as in some sense a natural kind – a very specific technology, which could have been invented in other places than it did. Then there are papers on the effect of Protestantism. The effect?
  
  
• True experiments with randomized treatments are not immune to the problem. An admirable political science paper played a radio soap in Rwandan villages to examine the effect of media on intergroup behaviour and attitudes (ungated psychology article on the same project). There are effects, but what is the treatment? Would it generalize to another soap? Another type of media? Another country? The author is aware of these issues.

The Y variable, what gets affected, is also vague. Suppose cross-ethnic giving increases by 10% in a dictator game. That is "social preferences". Yes, but what does it translate to in real life? 10% more giving to charity? We measure one decision or outcome, and have to guess how the result extends to the rest.

Are structural models the answer? Well, these models explicitly, formally specify how we think our results generalize. They may be wrong, but it is better to be clearly wrong than "not even wrong".

Laboratory experiments actually come off reasonably well. The definition of laboratory is a controlled environment. So at least we know what treatment we applied and in what context. We still don't know how our Xs or Ys generalize, but the cheapness of the lab means it may be easier to explore the boundaries of these variables.

One of the questions we are facing is: do we want to do "social science"? That is, can we reduce the social world to a small set of natural kinds and forces (preferences, beliefs...) and generalize effectively from one situation to others which are "similar" in our theoretical framework. As I argued before, we have no reason to believe that lab results using the framework of traditional micro generalize in this way. But maybe an expanded framework will do better.

Alternatively, you can take the Popperian perspective. There is no grand social science, just "piecemeal social engineering". The Rwanda radio experiment, for example, doesn't prove any big claim about "the effect of media on intergroup prejudice". It just proves that it might be worthwhile funding some more radio soaps like the one the experimenters used.

This is a less appealing vision of social research for most scientists. It is about feeling our way blindly instead of seeing the light. That may be the best we can do. If so, then careful estimation of causality is worthwhile research in itself. On the other hand, if we are still ambitious to find general frameworks and ways of seeing the world, then we need to pay as much attention to "identifying" X and Y as to identifying causal effects.

Lastly, the tree T plays no part in the analysis. It is just there to add realism.

I was 40 yesterday

... and the Metro newspaper wasn't being very helpful:

Experiments on children's lying

Psychologists do it differently:

Children’s statements after they have told an initial lie further reveal the role of intentionality. In the temptation resistance paradigm, after children denied transgressing, the experimenter asked follow-up questions. For example, when children peeked at a toy (e.g., Barney) and lied about peeking, the experimenter asked, “What do you think it is?” Children’s answers reveal a marked developmental change between 2 and 7 years of age: Most 2- to 3-year-olds blurt out “Barney!” without hesitation, thus revealing that they not only transgressed, but lied .... With increased age, children try to avoid making such blatantly inconsistent statements. Initially, their efforts may be a little clumsy and inconsistent (i.e., semantic leakage): For example, a 5-year-old girl said, “I didn’t peek at it. I touched it and it felt purple. So, I think it is Barney.”

The paradigm involves more deception than experimental economists would like. But the results are much more adorable!

Linkage

The myth of welfare's corrupting influence. Dammit, I hate linking to this and I am sure it's wrong.

Mark Harrison on Corbyn on the Ukraine.

Say "Yarr!" for academic piracy.

FSB to pre-check academic papers in Russia.

Dani Rodrik on Sledgehammer in Turkey

Dani Rodrik is not only the most thoughtful writer I know about international political economy, he has also been fighting for justice for his father-in-law in Turkey. Here is his account of a major conspiracy to subvert the rule of law. His description of the role of the intelligentsia, starting on page 23, is particularly uncomfortable reading.

There were a few prominent journalists such as Sedat Ergin, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, and Ezgi Başaran who wrote about the inconsistencies in the mainstream media. But for the most part we were ignored by the Turkish intelligentsia, and when not, pilloried for our views. Rarely was the evidence we presented discussed seriously....

Eventually, Görmüş would essentially give up any pretense of a credible court case against the defendants. In an interview published in early 2014, he would say he opposed the arguments Pınar and I were making because of the effect we were having on “public opinion”: “I am fighting against the perception that ‘nothing happened in this country since 2002, that the military did not take a stance against the elected government, that everything is made up.’”

Ultimately, to many commentators it apparently did not matter whether the Sledgehammer documents were authentic.

The highlighted part is to show what happens when you subordinate principle to means-end reasoning.

This a great piece of writing which, among other things, does the very needful job of naming the guilty men.

Linkage

This (old) piece by Bryan Caplan is a brilliant way of thinking about libertarianism: it brings out both how logical it is, and how dangerous and dysfunctional.

The sociologist Kieran Healy has a paper entitled Fuck Nuance.

Abstract: Seriously, fuck it.

From the body:

By calling for a theory to be more comprehensive, or for an explanation to include additional dimensions, or a concept to become more flexible and multifaceted, we paradoxically end up with less clarity. We lose information by adding detail. A further odd consequence is that the apparent scope of theories increases even as the range of their actually-accomplished application in explanations narrows. ... The particulars are “brought in” to the theory as general dimensions or levels of analysis—e.g., by nesting individuals, interactions, neighborhoods, and states; or by considering social- psychological, cultural, and structural aspects of the phenomenon; or by the simple claim that (for example) institutions matter, power matters, and culture matters, along with something new that the particular case suggests also matters.... Concept stands near concept—“Culture!” “Structure!” “Meaning!” “Power!”—like a herd of Brontosauruses ruminating in a primeval swamp.

Article in the FT which nicely talks about the tradeoffs between public and private companies.

EU: loosen or shift?

Britain needs to stay in the EU. Otherwise, politically, the EU will be crippled as a great power, and Britain will be too small to stand on its own; economically, the single market will fall apart, making European consumers worse off.

So, why do some want to leave? One reason is that the EU is partly a free market, partly a social democratic club. Social democracy, at least in its unreformed version, means overregulated markets and an unaffordable welfare state. The results are high unemployment, low growth, ever more debt and the prospect of Europe growing poorer and more irrelevant.

This is the problem facing David Cameron as he renegotiates the relationship, ahead of the UK referendum on "Brexit". There are two possible solutions.

One solution is: loosen up! If we renationalise powers from Brussels, individual countries can go their own way. Britain can go the sensible free-market liberal way, and other countries can do things differently if they want.

The other solution is to shift. If we persuade Brussels and Europe to move rightward, then we get what we want. All of Europe then moves in a free-market direction.

Loosening up sounds attractive and libertarian. Why should we impose our views on the whole continent, rather than simply requesting more freedom for ourselves?

But, loosening is the wrong path and shifting is the right one.

There is no such thing as "just" a single market. If you want freedom to trade, you have to stop countries imposing bad regulations to protect their national firms (who lobby the local politicians). Otherwise free trade across borders is just a meaningless idea.

We do need some regulation, though. So, we need European regulation, even if it sometimes is too heavy. Any sensible businessman would rather face one set of tough regulations than fifteen sets of light ones, all different. If we want to trade across Europe, we do need "ever closer union".

The biggest example of this is banking. A single market for investment could make Europe much wealthier. A single currency is a huge help for this. (Even though it has had devastating consequences in the short run – yes, the last ten years are the "short run"!) But a single currency requires transfers to help out poorer countries, which in turn requires a lot of political centralization and a bigger EU budget.

Also, imposing our views on the rest of Europe will make Europe better off. Nobody benefits from Italy's and France's "freedom" to be burdened with out-of-date regulations that keep unemployment high. We should make the case for them to move. That will make their societies better. Their well-being benefits us. David Cameron should persuade the whole flotilla of Europe to steer rightward, not sail off on his own.

Linkage

Unlearning economics on randomized controlled trials.

Among other things, the author argues that it is unethical to deny some people in the RCT a treatment, since this treatment is unambiguously useful. This argument is weak. The reason for doing RCTs is to learn how useful treatments are. People in the real world outside the trial are constantly denied useful treatments, because resources are not unlimited. We conduct the RCT to find out which treatments are the most useful. This minimizes the number of people who will be denied useful treatments in future. (Question: are the ethics of medical research vitiated by a bias in favour of the people in the trial over the future people who may be helped?)

Law enforcement might get your DNA from 23andme. 23andme have an option to delete your DNA data after 30 days, sounds like a sensible precaution.

Der Spiegel have uncovered evidence that Germany's right to host the 2006 World Cup was bought.

Corbyn's incentives

Jeremy Corbyn to become CND vice-president.

Side note: the last time I heard a speaker from CND was September 11th, 2001. I was on a demonstration against the arms trade. The news of the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks filtered through and a CND guy got to the microphone. He seemed euphoric. He said, "I hope nobody was hurt, but I hope they don't build it [the Pentagon] up again!" Cue enthusiastic applause from loons.

Many people think Jeremy Corbyn will be a terrible Labour leader because he is so idealistic. He surely is, but there is another way to look at it. Mr Corbyn's friends and allies come from Stop The War, CND, and similar organizations. He has worked with these people all his life. He wants them to do well, to gain influence and power. In his heart of hearts, he may know that Labour cannot win an election on a hard left platform. But the hard left can win Labour.

Those friends, he will think, have struggled all their lives for a just cause. Surely they deserve some influence and power now. And perhaps it's better to have the Labour party making truly socialist arguments and losing, than compromising and winning. (People pursuing their self-interest don't drop all ideals; they just develop more suitable ones.)

So from this perspective, Jeremy Corbyn and his backers have an interest in Labour being unelectable.

Nobel: haters gonna hate

Haters gonna hate. I see a namecheck for Zygmunt Bauman. Maybe he can get a Nobel for copying his books off Wikipedia; instead of such trivia as "“contributions to methods of analysing economic time series with time-varying volatility” (2003) or the “analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity” (2008)' which, like, can't be real science because they sound sooo boooring.

This article also contains sentences like

Over the past decades mainstream economics in universities has become increasingly mathematical, focusing on complex statistical analyses and modelling to the detriment of the observation of reality.

which is precisely 180º wrong. (Duflo? List? Or, I heard there's some guy called Deaton who spent huge amounts of effort designing household surveys to figure out the best way of measuring poverty.)

There is a real case for humility in economic research, and for sensitivity to the limits of quantitative methods. There's even a real case for qualitative research. It would be great if the case could be made by somebody who knew something about economics.

Linkage

Perl 6 is (almost) ready to release.

Exxon did its own climate change research, back in the 1970s and 80s.

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... their falseness and malice are well known. But one thing I dare well say that if any beast has the devil’s spirit in him without doubt it is the cat, both the wild and the tame.

So true.

Credit scoring in China.

The hot hand fallacy may actually be a truthacy.

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The personal story of an immigrant to Spain from the US.

Effective altruism. Now you can tell annoying chuggers "Real altruists take jobs on Wall Street."

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David Reinstein: let's help the poor by making it easier for companies to offer them low prices.

THES world rankings.

I suspect home bias; compare the Shanghai ranking. I just don't believe that Oxford is better than Harvard. (Let alone better than Cambridge, of course:)

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George Borjas has a new paper on the Mariel boatlift (an exogenous shock that allowed many Cubans to migrate to Miami). This looks at a famous paper by David Card, and reverses its conclusions. But note, it also admits that the econometrics are tricky:

The analysis also documents the sensitivity of the estimated wage impact to the choice of a placebo. The measured impact is much smaller when the placebo consists of cities where pre-Mariel employment growth was weak relative to Miami.

A novelist's take on the demand for bad social science.

Kenan Malik on multiculturalism - very thoughtprovoking and particularly interesting is the idea that class in the 19th century was in some way close to race today. (Remember George Orwell:

Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West — the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.
That was what we were taught — the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier.

)

Glossy science versus messy science

TL;DR: the editor said a bad thing, and now I am sad about incentives for researchers.

 Just got a desk reject for my honesty paper. The journal editor's comments were brief, but very thoughtful and useful, and I'd much rather have a quick decision than wait 3 months for the same one.

There was one point I disagreed with. The editor commented that my two measures of honesty didn't correlate highly at country level, and this left the reader unsure of how to interpret the results.

Well, sure. Here below is honesty measured by a coin flip. (You ask people to flip a coin and report the result, and you give them a reward for getting heads. If everyone was honest you'd see 50% reporting heads; the proportion actually reporting heads gives you an estimate of the proportion of honesty in the group – in this case, each of the 15 countries.)

 And here is honesty measured by answers to quiz questions. (The questions were so hard that you could only answer, I claim, by cheating and looking up the answers on the internet. See the paper for more details.)

The two measures indeed have some big differences. For example, the Japanese sample goes from really dishonest in the coin flip to really honest in the quiz. (Why? Well, gambling is illegal in Japan. Maybe Japanese people saw the coin flip as already a bit naughty, and felt less inhibited about unethical behaviour in that context. Or maybe [insert your preferred post hoc explanation here].) So, yes, these differences make it harder to interpret the results.

But suppose I only had the coin flip measure – like, ahem, several other papers on this topic. Then my results would be really easy to interpret! Of course, they would also be potentially misleading. No single measure is guaranteed to capture exactly what we want, all have potential confounds like attitudes to gambling, or attitudes to quizzes. That's why we need to use multiple measures and check robustness of our results.

I think we should be careful about the incentives we create. If we only demand data that tells a simple clear story, that is what we will get: glossy science that sells well, instead of messy science, which is the reality.

Maybe what I should have done is published one paper with the coin flip results. Then I could publish a  second paper saying "Ah, but results are different in the quiz experiment!" Ha ha. Of course I would never....

Linkage

“Mark my words, Reg, there’s been an orgy here tonight.” Ian Jack recalls his 1980s reports on the Bright Young Things at Oxford. As usual this is brilliant social history.

The First World War German pirate sailing ship.

Re Volkswagen: corporate culture is not enough

Well, this is absolutely a problem of neoliberalism (an idea I basically support, by the way). The whole thing with European regulators handing over emissions tests to the companies themselves, then not bothering to check them? Oosh. Classic abdication to market forces.

It is also absolutely a problem of corporate culture, and I expect to see a lot of talk from VW about culture, principles and values... probably a "value change" programme, et cetera.

The idea of corporate culture is that an organization can have its own inspiring values. This idea has a weakness: what happened at VW was probably not about employees being selfish. It was probably about people doing what they thought would benefit VW. (Mistakenly and short-sightedly, for certain, but that is hindsight.) Now it is possible to create a culture where cheating the company is frowned upon, but it seems hard to create a company culture which will consistently frown upon doing things that benefit the company. For, what incentive do the company and its employees have to maintain that culture?

A second weakness is that employees have already been socialized in ways that are hard to undo. Just as it is hard to learn a new language as an adult, it is also hard for adults to learn that cheating and lying are wrong, if they have not internalized that already. (Almost everyone knows by that age to say that cheating and lying are wrong, but that is not the same.)

So, a better way to improve corporate culture is to start outside the company, in schools and in families, and to ensure that we are bringing young people up right.

Which leads me back to my research on honesty in different countries. Here's the per cent of nationals from 15 countries who reported flipping a coin and getting heads. They were paid $3 to $5 for heads, but nothing for tails. The excess over 50% gives you an estimate of how many people in each country are lying.

GB Britain; ZA South Africa; PorTugal; GReece; CH Switzerland; DenmarK; TuRkey; US; ARgentina; RUssia; BRazil; INdia; K: South Korea; JaPan; ChiNa

Ordinary people in Britain – this is not a student sample, by the way – appear strikingly honest on average. I am not sure the same is true at higher echelons of society, but let's hope so. (No Germany, sorry! But this paper suggests that the Germans too are highly honest.)

Jeremy and Dave

Jeremy Corbyn is planning to apologize for the Iraq war and say that Britain must never use armed force for regime change again.

I used to think that Corbyn was great news for Conservatives. This is the Michael Foot analogy. But Foot was under Thatcher, who went on in the 83-87 period to basically refound the British economy. Now we have Cameron, who will go down in history as a gap between more interesting people. Cameron enrages me the way Tony Blair once enraged the hard Left.

The defence of this government is that (i) it is putting our house in order and (ii) the economy is growing. (i) is false. Austerity stopped in 2012. The government is still in deficit, seven years after the 2008 crisis. The date for breaking even has repeatedly been put back. I doubt that it will ever come: there will be some new headwinds and we will return to living beyond our means. This is a long-term threat to our political system and I see no will or courage to fix it among our politicians.

Point (ii) is true but it has nothing to do with the bold reforms undertaken by our government. What bold reforms? Cameronism means handouts for the middle classes, much of it based on the house speculation economy: free help to buy a house; no inheritance tax if you buy a house; free chunks of the Post Office.... Economic growth is more to do with cheap money finally coming into the economy, and the resulting increase in consumption. That is not a hard trick to pull off.

With a leader like this, you actually want a decent opposition who can hold the government to account. Unfortunately we have Corbyn, who hopes to appeal to the British people by apologizing for the events of a decade ago and promising to tie our hands behind our backs. I marched against the Iraq war, but come on. (Here is Corbyn on the Russian propaganda channel RT, by the way, looking high minded and preaching about US imperialism while not mentioning the Ukraine.)

Linkage

The incredible proof machine (nerdy).

Mokyr on technological change, and Brad Delong responds (via Economist's View).

Another take on behavioural economics: "Please, not another bias!"

There aren’t 165 human biases. There are 165 deviations from the wrong model.

This reminds me of something Werner Güth said to me once: "I saw so many papers coming out with stories of inequality, betrayal aversion etc. that I decided to cultivate aversion aversion."

He then added a typically profound and provocative aside, that much later, he had realised that risk aversion was equally problematic. His point, I think, was that the concept of risk aversion, which is absolutely mainstream microeconomics, is itself a sticking plaster over our failure to come up with good descriptions of human decision-making.

Psychology from Francis Bacon

It is a point of cunning, to wait upon him with whom you speak, with your eye; as the Jesuits give it in precept: for there be many wise men, that have secret hearts, and transparent countenances....

Another is, that when you have anything to obtain, of present despatch, you entertain and amuse the party, with whom you deal, with some other discourse; that he be not too much awake to make objections. I knew a counsellor and secretary, that never came to Queen Elizabeth of England, with bills to sign, but he would always first put her into some discourse of estate, that she mought the less mind the bills....

I knew one that, when he wrote a letter, he would put that, which was most material, in the postscript, as if it had been a by-matter.

I knew another that, when he came to have speech, he would pass over that, that he intended most; and go forth, and come back again, and speak of it as of a thing, that he had almost forgot....

It is strange how long some men will lie in wait to speak somewhat they desire to say; and how far about they will fetch; and how many other matters they will beat over, to come near it. It is a thing of great patience, but yet of much use. 

Bacon, Of Cunning

Radicalization redux

A while back I wrote:

Politically, governments want social science to support their narratives.... Right now, fear of Islamists means there is a demand for studies of "radicalization". Maybe radicalization is a good object of study – maybe the concept cuts reality at the joints. More likely, it is a concept du jour which adds nothing to the idea of persuasion. 

At a recent workshop preparing for a big government grant application, a distinguished economist explained to me how work in his (thoroughly abstract and theoretical) field could be usefully applied to radicalization.

Noone really understands the true nature of fawning servility until he has seen an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of money.

– Yes, Minister

Experimental economics after the demolition job on theory

The front cover of Richard Thaler's autobiography Misbehaving shows a single bird, looking quizzically at a huge flock of birds who are all flying in the same direction. It's a metaphor for behavioural economics. The single bird is the lone behaviourist; the flock is the economic theorists who all think the same way. And indeed, the book is a story of conflicts in which standard economic theory and presuppositions turned out to be wrong.

Economic experiments started as critique. A typical experiment takes real humans and puts them into a situation designed to be as much as possible like an economic model. Payoffs are well-defined. Subjects know all about the experiment in advance. Play is anonymous - so there's no chance to "change the game" by, say, taking your partner out for a pint afterwards. None of this is anything like the real world. But, if economic theory doesn't even get it right in these situations, what hope does it have in the real world?

I happen to think that the critique has been successful. Sensible economists no longer take (e.g.) rational maximization of monetary payoffs, or Bayesian updating, as Gospel which somehow must be true. They accept that other things might happen.

Having performed this negative task, experimentalists have gone further. They want to build their own "behavioural" theories of how people do act. But now there is a problem.

Standard theory is a function from game forms to behaviour. Given such-and-such a set of players, payoffs, information sets and action spaces, Nash equilibrium predicts such and such behaviour from each player. If standard theory is right, then people in a lab experiment which implements a "game" in this way will behave exactly as the theory predicts. They don't, so standard theory is falsified. Fine.

But it does not follow that there is another theory, which also takes games forms as the input, and which will always correctly spit out people's behaviour. Indeed, we know that this does not work. For example, people behave very differently if you call a public goods game "the community game" or "the Wall Street game". But the game-theoretic description is unaltered by this label. There is no correct theory of behaviour which depends only on game forms.

Unfortunately, lab experimenters have blithely continued to write down game forms that correspond to real world situations; implement them in the lab; observe behaviour, perhaps building a model to predict it; and assume that this is what will happen in the real world. There is now a huge accumulation of such experiments. You can see them at any experimental conference.

There is no reason to believe this approach will work. Other things than actions, information and incentives matter. So mimicking actions, information and incentives in the lab does not guarantee people will behave the same way as in the real world.

This whole research programme has to stop. Then we can start designing experiments that will tell us about the real world. In particular, a first step is to think more carefully about the theory that makes any given laboratory experiment informative about the social phenomenon of interest. Such a theory is always needed. Psychology can be helpful here, because it opens the black box of the mind and tries to find how the subject perceives a given situation.

But my main point is: stop the mindless empiricism in economic lab experiments.