Traditionally, students of economics have often been told that it is a non-experimental science. Using a quantitative … and qualitative analysis of introductory economics textbooks, we track the historical evolution of this rhetoric from 1970 … experimentation in economics. Remarks that experiments are impossible in economics have been (almost) eliminated only this decade …

sample of economics textbooks from the 1940s to the 1980s. It is argued that they contain nothing to contradict the …