strength in numbers

It's telling that the greatest economics revolution of my lifetime was "behavioral economics," which could also be called "checking to see whether real people act like we've assumed they acted."

If it seems weird that economists would spend generations operating on the incorrect assumption that people behave in a certain way without ever checking, consider that Aristotle assumed women had fewer teeth than men, – and never bothered to count.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/aristotles-error/

Accountants check, and what they find is…gnarly. In "An Accounting Model of the UK Exchequer," Andrew Berkeley, Richard Tye & Neil Wilson offer a mindbending account (heh) of where money comes from (hint: not taxes), and where it goes ("poof").

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless