David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the Nobel Prize in economics this week, not so much for what they discovered, but for how they discovered it.

Why is this important: While fellow laureates Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer are known to design experiments to quantify the effects of economic interventions, this year’s laureates attempt to find natural experiments that can determine whether economic theory is really true. .

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The most famous card paper, comparing unemployment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, showed that economic theory was wrong about the minimum wage – that its increase might have little or no effect on unemployment, in the real world.

• Other natural experiences found by the winners involved things like the lottery number individuals received in the Vietnam War Draft, or – in the case of an article Alex Tabarrok calls “one of the finest in the whole economy ”- the month people were born in, which has a small but significant effect on the level of education they receive.

The bottom line: If economics has the slightest claim to be a science, it must be falsifiable. Card, by falsifying at least one economic theory, undoubtedly helped to make his subject a science.

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