The Future of Economics May Be in the Hands of Machine Learning

Economists have largely preferred to act within their own field and interpretations. However, the rise of big data challenges, data analytics, and machine learning is beginning to change all that. In the summer of 2015, Susan Athey, a Professor of Economics of Technology at Stanford attracted a crowd of over 250 economists for a one-day instructive session on machine learning. Historically, the discipline of economics has always been categorized among the social sciences, which means the word'science' should be understood as somewhat loosely applied. Unlike the natural sciences, which are prescribed as strictly positivist and bound by the ideals of empirical truth to only build theories around quantitative data that can be measured and duplicated, social sciences are often influenced by observations that are open to interpretation.