What happens when caged economics meets economics in the wild? One discovers that the world outside is not really a wilderness; it is more like a reservation. This discovery should not be surprising. As we have stated, a “natural experiment” in economics is not an experiment that takes place in nature. It is an experiment that typically takes advantage of certain programs, policies, or political-economic processes that have arranged the sociotechnical world in a way that makes experimentation possible. The investigator does not control these wider experiments, but he or she relies on them. Although the forms of this reliance will be different in different cases, the possibility of economic experimentation depends on the larger programs, which constitute what we call the economy. The experiment works on prior experiments.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1985