My guest today is the Nobel Prize winning MIT economist, Josh Engrist.

It's extra special to have Josh on the podcast because he was a pioneer in the very approach

I built my own academic career around what we call natural experiments.

Natural experiments started to attract people like me partly because it was interesting

and fun and we had the opportunity to actually say something concrete about the world.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

When I talk with businesses, governments and nonprofits these days, there's a lot of

interest in applying ideas from behavioral economics and in running randomized experiments.

But nobody outside of academia is talking about natural experiments.

Let's see if a conversation with Josh Engrist can open people's eyes to the incredible

untapped potential of natural experiments.

So Josh, you and I have both devoted much of our careers as economists to studying natural

experiments.

Yeah.

And I sometimes struggle when I try to explain to the uninitiated what natural experiments

are and why they're so valuable for understanding the world.

I start by talking about a true randomized experiment.

I say you've got a researcher.

He randomly assigns half the people to a treatment group and half to a control group.

And because it's random, we would expect that absent any kind of treatment.

The two groups would have identical outcomes.

And if we do observe differences in outcomes across the treatment and the control group,

...