Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. Namely: To get economists to humbly serve the demagogues that rule the world instead of bluntly challenging their unabated demagoguery.

Paranoid? I don’t think so. Show me a single published economics RCT that concludes, “Government should stop trying to fix this problem and just allow a free market.” No, no, no. They’ll always either find that (a) the treatment “worked” — so government should scale it up; or (b) the treatment “failed” — so government should keep running RCTs until they find a treatment that works. “Freedom” never counts as a “treatment.”