The last two decades in academic economics have seen revolutionary methodological progress across fields. However, in some ways, this methodological progress seems to have produced near-0, or negative, conceptual progress

Today, compared to 20 years ago, we have bigger datasets, better identification, bigger models, faster computers. Our methods are more rigorous than ever before. But the answers we seem to systematically run into, across areas, are - things are complicated

Things are complicated, and dependent on the setting we study them in, and specifics of the models we use, and so on and so forth. The old, clean "economics" was - we mostly think - at best a great oversimplification. But we haven't replaced them with better oversimplifications

We've mostly replaced them with the humble recognition that this are complicated and assumption- and setting-dependent. idk. Maybe there are no oversimplifications. Maybe the complexity is irreducible. Maybe the hope for a simple economic "theory of everything" was misguided

I'm not saying that we didn't make progress, to be clear. Going back: the methodological innovations just haven't led to very much clean, conceptual insights, of the form we thought (probably wrongly) we had in the much earlier days of the field