On Thu, 6 May 2004, John Adams wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 5, 2004, at 02:24 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Who knows? How else can you do economics? Experimentation is
> > impossible.
>
> On the macro level, maybe, but on the micro level, what exactly do you
> think all those giant data warehouses full of point-of-sale data are?
> Those are the data repositories of the biggest microeconomic
> experiments ever done, performed by people who really, really want
> reliable results.
>
> All the best,
>
> John A
No, they're not experiments. In an experiment, you manipulate the causal factor (indepedent variable) and assess the change in another factor. They are interesting econ data, but they're not experimental data.
Miles