Eight top young economists on where the field is going

It starts with Nicholas Bloom and Raj Chetty, and includes Ali Wyne and Peter Leeson and Justin Wolfers,  among other luminaries,  courtesy of Big Think.  Here is Bloom:

I do not think that any one single breakthrough will happen.  The progress is likely to be heavily empirical—simply because more and more data is becoming available, and it is easy to analyze with fast computers (so empirics is now advancing faster than theory)—and spread across many hundreds of topics.  So economics has gone from Victorian science, where one genius in his shed could invent the steam engine over the weekend, to industrial science, where innovation comes in thousands of tiny steps made by dozens of research teams.

Here is Wolfers:

Economic theory will become a tool we use to structure our investigation of the data.  Equally, economics is not the only social science engaged in this race: our friends in political science and sociology use similar tools; computer scientists are grappling with “big data” and machine learning; and statisticians are developing new tools.  Whichever field adapts best will win.  I think it will be economics.

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