The Rise of the French Socialists and the New Book "Uncontrolled"

I celebrate the celebration of randomized field experiments and I'm happy that a MIT nerd has written a whole business book about them.   Today's headlines suggest that France is now running a regime shift experiment to see whether a radical change in public finance and borrowing more money from Germany can improve economic outcomes.  The challenge that "macro scholars" face is that they do not have a control group while the micro RCT scholars have a good one.

I have not read "uncontrolled" but a key issue here is selection bias.  A firm is only willing to run a field experiment when three conditions hold;

1. It knows that it does not know a key parameter of interest such as the elasticity of demand for a product.
2. It has the self confidence to give up control of its operations to a research nerd to implement and evaluate the experiment in question.
3.  It believes that running the experiment will yield sufficient ex-post benefits to justify the annoyance cost of implementing the disruptive experiment in the first place.

I would suggest to you dear reader that the companies that would most benefit from running field experiments are the least likely to meet these 3 criteria.   U.S productivity would be higher if we had more firm experimentation but risk taking within bureaucracies is not always rewarded. We need a new generation of leveraged buy out artists to come in and take over companies that do not experiment enough.

Returning to France,  the macro economists face a challenge.   We do not know the correct model economic growth and different decision makers have different models in their head.  There is also a game theoretic issue lurking of "too big to fail" and basic time consistency issues that past promises will be broken.  Germany tried to commit Europe's nations to rules over discretion but the Socialist election promises another regime break.  We will soon see new papers on political business cycles and their impact on investment under uncertainty.  I believe that Becker, Davis and Murphy's WSJ piece applies in the case of Europe.   The uncertainty created by the political regime shift will freeze up investment in Europe and this will further slow growth.  While Dr. Krugman demands a sharp increase in public demand, what will this $ be spent on? Who will be held accountable for spending it efficiently?  Once government ramps up, what institutions will reduce the size of the government once the bad times end?   What RCT can be used to answer these questions?