An open and curious mind is at the heart of all earnest scientific inquiry. The rise of empirical work to the forefront of modern economics is a great boon for all of us, as the continuing flow of new facts and information into the economic literature and public sphere allows to us to test our ideas against reality and develop new ones when the data suggests there is a need.

When we tell stories about scientific progress, we often like to stress the parts where the open minded investigator comes upon a discovery that others missed or where some overlooked genius has their new ideas vindicated by new evidence. But having your ideas proven wrong surely happens a lot more often -- even though it's not the case we give as much attention to. This is a bit of a problem: having role models for gracefully accepting new evidence that rejects your ideas is, if anything, probably more important than having a million role models in the form of vindicated geniuses.

In this spirit, we're hosting an essay contest focused on how you might be wrong about economics right now and on the times you've been proven wrong in the past. There are two different prompts to which you may respond, each with their own prizes available.

Prompt 1: What Would It Take to Change Your Mind?

Please describe an economic belief¹ you currently hold, what evidence causes you to hold that belief right now, and what new empirical evidence that could plausibly come out within the next 20 years would force you to change your mind on that subject.

Prompt 2: Why Have You Changed Your Mind in the Past?

Please describe an economic belief¹ you used to hold, why used used to hold that belief, and what made you change your mind on that subject.

Contest winners will be chosen and prizes will be awarded immediately after the contest finishes at the end of February. In particular, r/BE mods will vote to decide on a winning essay for each prompt, as well as to decide which of those two essays is the overall contest winner. In addition to glory and honor, I will award the winner for each prompt reddit premium and a $20 donation in their name (or pseudonym) to the charity of their choice. The overall winner will receive, on top of their best prompt prize, an additional $30 for their chosen charity. There will also be reddit gold available as a people's choice prize for the most upvoted essay submitted and for gorbachev's choice awards, given for my personal favorite essays and for the best RIs about contest submissions.

A few simple rules:

• Essays should be no longer than 5 moderate sized paragraphs in length.
• Essays should be readable at the senior undergraduate economics course level.
• Essays should be submitted as top level comments in this thread. Please label which prompt you are responding to in the post.
• You may submit as many essays per prompt as you wish. Mods are encouraged to submit essays as well, but are not allowed to vote for their own pieces.
• Discussion of essays is highly encouraged, but please do so in the comments under each essay. Top level comments in this thread that are not essay submissions will generally be removed.
• Essays must be submitted by February 28th.

Good luck to all interested! I'm excited to see why y'all have changed your mind in the past and what could make you do so again in the future!

PS -- results from our last contest, "The Economic Ideas You Should Forget" Contest, may be found in this thread.

¹ To clarify what I mean by "economic belief", it is has to a belief about some economic subject that has a large positive component. Here are some examples: "long-term money neutrality is true", "there is substantial monopsony power in the labor market for low wage workers", "the elasticity of investment to capital gains taxes is highly elastic", "local economies recover from most negative shocks within about 10 years", "modern monetary theory is mostly correct", "the natural rate of unemployment is 5%", "debt to GDP ratios greater than two are unsustainable", ", "Austrian business cycle theory is mostly correct", "automation will not cause any job losses on net", "carbon taxes are the most efficient available tool for reducing global carbon emissions", "recent studies have underrated the negative health effects of air pollution on infants", "hospital mergers will generally have no effect on prices faced by consumers", "there are large, long term effects of pre-K on earnings".