THE DISMAL SCIENCE REMAINS DISMAL, SAY SCIENTISTS

The paper inhales more than 6,700 individual pieces of research, all meta-analyses that themselves encompass 64,076 estimates of economic outcomes. That’s right: It’s a meta-meta-analysis. And in this case, Doucouliagos never meta-analyzed something he didn’t dislike. Of the fields covered in this corpus, half were statistically underpowered—the studies couldn’t show the effect they said they did. And most of the ones that were powerful enough overestimated the size of the effect they purported to show. Economics has a profound effect on policymaking and understanding human behavior. For a science, this is, frankly, dismal.