As a new quick rule of thumb inspired by the Nature papers, you could do worse than “cut estimated effect sizes in half”. If a published paper says that a college degree raises wages 100%, then chances are the degree really does raise wages, but more like 40–50%. In 2005, John Ioannidis said that “most published research findings are false”. By 2026, we seem to have improved to “most published research findings are exaggerated.”

That’s the conclusion of my piece out today at Econlog: “Is Economics Finally Becoming Trustworthy?“

There’s plenty of both good and bad news for economics and the social sciences in both my piece and the Nature special issue it describes. It’s kind of like the Our World in Data motto:

In short, our attempt to replicate hundreds of papers showed that published social science results shouldn’t be trusted precisely today, but they seem to be getting more reliable over time, and they are much more reliable than chance. Economics and political science look the best, though we are still very far from perfect:

You can read the full piece here.