IT'S CALLED SIFTING AND WINNOWING.

Reason's Peter Suderman makes what in other times might be an obvious methodological point.

This week, the Nobel Prize in economics went to David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens, a trio of scholars whose work helped spark what has been called the "credibility revolution." Not only is it a richly deserved award for a trio of innovative economists who helped improve the quality of social science findings, but it is also a sort of quiet rebuff to those on the left who oppose values like "rigor" and "objectivity" in data-gathering entirely.

The credibility revolution was just what it sounds like: It made economics more credible through the development of novel analytical methods that were both statistically sound and, importantly, easy to understand and explain.

There are limits to what one can do experimentally, because of the usual propensities of complex adaptive systems, and theoretical econometricians earn their keep by demonstrating all the ways statistical inference can go wrong. But economics is about the interactions of people, and making sense of what they do ought be part of doing work.

The credibility revolution, which began in the 1990s, was about finding ways to better use data and perform experiments that would produce better results. As Angrist and Pischke wrote, "the primary force driving the credibility revolution has been a vigorous push for better and more clearly articulated research designs."

In particular, they helped advance the use of empirical studies of real-world events that served as natural experiments, in which investigators test the effect of an experimental variable by using a real-world control. Natural experiments, of course, can be difficult to interpret; this group's work helped economists understand how and when natural experiments can reveal causality.

Over the last several decades, their innovative research designs, and other methods derived from them, have made it possible for economists to productively study events that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to study via the randomized controlled experiments that are considered the gold standard in economic research.

So they didn't just discover some new, interesting information; they developed widely applicable methods that made it possible for us to better study and better understand our world. In many cases, these techniques have replaced older methods that relied primarily on models and statistical analysis that had little or no connection to real-world events.

There are randomized experiments using college students participating in simulations, and there are randomized experiments in which people get different kinds of transfer payments, that's a fraught way of getting data, isn't it?  There's still plenty of opportunity for people to do the more traditional econometric investigations, as long as they are careful.

Read on for the methodological argument.

I think you can also understand this particular award, with its emphasis on methodological innovation—on producing better research that does a more convincing job of proving what it is we think we know—also serves as an implicit rebuke to a certain form of leftist thinking that's been percolating through various organizations and institutions.

These economists made their field more credible by making it more rigorous, in the sense that they provided better measurement tools, and more objective, in the sense that the results were less dependent on the biases and assumptions of the investigators. These are good things. Indeed, they are such obviously good things that it is almost strange to remark upon them at all. Yet the seemingly obvious proposition that social science should strive, whenever possible, to be more objective and rigorous is now under attack—not only from fringe segments of the left, but from within institutions nominally devoted to sound social science.

And that, dear reader, is what continual and fearless sifting and winnowing is all about.

In certain quarters of the left, rigor and objectivity—the qualities that give research credibility—are no longer seen as obviously good.

Those qualities, however, are what this year's Nobel prize is all about. So not only is this year's economics Nobel an award for a group of economists whose innovations have had an immense impact on the field, but it is also a defense of a set of values that should guide all social science research.

One might think that these values need no defense, that they speak for themselves—and yet it's clearer than ever that they are under attack, and that they must be explicitly defended.

Deconstruct that.