A natural experiment in economics is not an experiment carried out in nature. It is an establishing of facts carried out in a world that has been organized to make it possible for economic knowledge to be made. Latour refers to this organizing work as “metrology,” meaning “the gigantic enterprise to make of the outside a world inside which facts . . . can survive” (Latour 1987, 251; see also Mitchell 2002, chapter 3). Experiments to establish the facts of economics depend on projects carried out in the wider world to create sites where economic knowledge can gain a purchase. These sites, though larger than an ordinary laboratory, are nevertheless quite closely defined spaces—specific neighborhoods in particular cities of Peru, the local offices of a development organization and a neoliberal think tank, the text of a survey questionnaire and its administrators, the offices of a parent organization in Washington that provides the funds. As Latour points out, to provide a secure site for establishing facts, these locations must be well connected to one another. The interconnections establish the routes along which facts can travel and be confirmed. They also shape what kinds of facts can survive. To understand the outcome of the academic experiment in Peru, we must understand these routes created by the larger neoliberal political experiment.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1940