Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. This week's podcast is a little bit off the beaten track. I want to

talk about truth. How do we know what we know is true or a little more accurately? How do we know

what we believe to be true is actually true when it comes to economics? Can economics make any

claim to being a science? To get at these questions, I'll talk about how my views on these questions have

changed and, incidentally, most of that change has come from being the host of the show and talking

to a lot of interesting people. And to help me think about these issues, I have Robin Hansen with

this today, my colleague here at George Mason, whose blog Overcoming Bias deals with many of these

issues. Robin, welcome back to econtalk. I'd like it to be here. To get us started, I want to give a fairly

long opening monologue. It's a confession of sorts. I'm putting myself on the couch of economic

psychoanalysis with Dr. Hansen, my bias therapist. So here we go. About a year and a half ago, I did a

podcast with David Henderson. David Henderson is a blogger at econlog, part of the Library of

Economics and Liberty, and he is the editor of the concise encyclopedia of economics. And we got

into a conversation about why economists disagree. And it's very common to hear people make

fun of economists for not agreeing on stuff. And we economists, I think, are kind of sensitive to this

attack. And we often respond, as David did, at least as I remember it, by saying something like,

well, actually, the agreements bigger than you think. In the area of microeconomics, there's lots of

agreement. We agree on lots of things, both in the methodological sense about how incentives matter. And

then we agree on lots of policy issues, like the minimum wage or tariffs. Most economists are against

...