Answer to Question #94729 in Algebra for grace

Question

25. Economists are social scientists. Because they cannot answer many questions about society in laboratories like physicists or chemists, they often use natural experiments, such as
a. forcing one group of students to use computers in class and forcing another group of students not to use them.
b. randomly accepting some Montana high school students to college and rejecting the others.
c. comparing the labor market outcomes of students whose college entrance exam scores were just above and just below the cut-off for admission to college.
d. tossing coins to decide who will be subject to a state minimum wage law.

Answer 1

Actually and unfortunately, it may seem like that. But indeed, if we do not have formulas and equations of human behavior, we can learn many important and useful things about human nature. Social sciences can be compared to medicine. You cant exactly calculate the outcome of some treatment or solve a system of vector equations to understand that a person have fever. However, the observations processed with instruments of statistics and probability give important results and help to calculate the probabilities of a certain outcome (treatment, wage, or the number of students who will enter the college next year). Of course, no human being is perfect, and the researcher's own attitude can influence the results of his experiments or even some part of society (remember WWII when science was not used to help the humanity).

That is why even social sciences use math apparatus to fairly evaluate natural experiments and cleanse them from personal attitude.

For instance:

a) If two groups of the same number of students do some work, one with computers and the other without them, economists may find the time required to do some amount of work and conclude that working with computers is more efficient.

b) If economists randomly accept some students and reject others, students with different abilities will study at a certain school, and most likely the researchers will find out that the graph showing the time required for the students to complete some tasks vs. number of students will look like normal distribution.

c) This experiment can be used to estimate probability of getting a certain level of income for students with certain marks and this can be extrapolated to a broader number of people. Then this can help to understand what reasons lead to a certain choice of jobs or income, and can be used to develop motivation techniques for different groups of people

d) I'm not sure i correctly understand what you meant saying "tossing coins" but the state minimum wage law protects employees from too low hourly wage and gives opportunities: it is like employees start running their career distance not from the very start line ($0.5/hour) but from some distance ahead of it.