karl popper vs. the identification people

Truth be told, I think Popper would have approved of the identification effort. How could the person who advanced falsification not have approved of an attempt to address endogeneity and unobserved variables? But most people ignore an important aspect of Popper’s beliefs about scientific theories. He also thought that theories deserve special attention if they make unexpected predictions. Thus, falsification was very powerful if combined with creative derivation of hypotheses.

Now, identification is not in any way contrary to that view. Instrumental variables, or any other technique addressing identification, can be used to test  unexpected hypotheses. However, real scientific practice is about trade offs. Should I spend my time on theory building or some other activities? My view of the identification craze isn’t that it’s wrong. My view is that it’s “end game.” In other words, identification is a luxury when you have an abundance of data and a pretty clear idea about what causal effects you care about. It’s the epitome of normal science.

That’s why I keep a little distance from the identification craze. Sure, I’ll agree it’s important, but too much identification means that you are unwilling to do difficult theory work that’s needed for real scientific progress. You’ll reject research questions that don’t have some built in identitifcation strategy. Any time people focus on tools, they tend to work less on coming up with novel predictions and they work on adjudicating between the same old competitors.