Nobody really knows what anyone means by “cancel culture,” but I think it usually pretty clearly has something to do with a climate of fear.

That’s why I had such a negative reaction to Sarah Owermohle’s April 12 article in Stat News titled “A controversial hire at Arnold Ventures raises questions about the donor’s stance on addiction.” The story is about Jennifer Doleac, a professor at Texas A&M who’s been a podcast guest of mine and who recently announced she’ll be leaving academia after this school year to join Arnold Ventures as a VP for criminal justice policy. The thrust of the piece is that some people don’t agree with one of her empirical papers in which she tried to estimate the impact of naloxone access laws on overdose mortality. Doleac, along with co-author Anita Mukherjee of the University of Wisconsin, found that while having more naloxone available does increase the survivability of any specific overdose episode, the aggregate impact is “more opioid-related emergency room visits and more opioid-related theft, with no net measurable reduction in opioid-related mortality.”

Not everyone likes this conclusion, and not everyone finds the paper convincing. The empirical turn in economics has been a positive development in a lot of ways, but it does often run into the reality that even with the best possible methods for causal inference, it’s hard to reach definitive conclusions. You can look at any of Doleac’s papers — or any comparable paper by anyone in the field — and poke holes in it if it has some normative implication that you’re displeased with.