Yes, so my parents are both biologists and I did not follow their route.

I didn't go into the natural sciences.

It's Amy Finkelstein.

In college, I was studying political science and most of my work was qualitative and I'd

bring home a term paper that I was proud of and I'd have made some arguments in it and

my father would read it and say, well, you know, that's nice, but you could have just

as easily argued the other side.

You could have just as easily argued the other side in a family of researchers of empirical

thinkers, those were fighting words.

Amy Finkelstein eventually came around to her father's view.

Today, she's as impatient with a certain kind of argument as he was.

You know, if I talk to a friend of mine, for example, who's a law professor, they'll

often describe their research as, I'm trying to make the following argument.

I never hear my fellow empirical economists ever describing the research as, I'm trying

to make the following argument.

That's right.

Finkelstein wound up entering the Dismal Science.

I'm a professor of economics at MIT and I'm one of the scientific directors of J. Pal

North America.

We'll explain J. Pal later, but first, how Finkelstein and her fellow economists do describe

their research.

They say, I'm trying to figure out something, right?

...