4 Potential Outcomes and Randomization – Causal Inference<br/>*The Remix*
All scientists, including economists and other social scientists, have been concerned about cause and effect since the beginning. You can see it even in the founder of economics, Adam Smith, who included the word “cause” in the title of his most famous book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776). Why people felt they needed to understand causality cannot be reduced to any one motivation. For some, it was likely a desire driven by a curious spirit, whereas for others it may have been more pragmatic because if you knew something caused something else, then you could potentially invent something to make money or, perhaps more altruistically, save a life. But whatever the core motivation people had for wanting to know it, separating cause and effect from coincidences and meaningless patterns became a quest, and once real progress was made, nontrivial advances began showing up in spades.1 With both my personal story and that selective history of causal