Rejoinder to Evidence and the micro-foundations of economic growth by Michael Joffe

This is a response to Joffe (this issue (Joffe, 2017b)) and aims to demonstrate that economics needs theory that is developed in collaboration with real-world data and that approaches utilised in other disciplines may be transferred to enable this goal. Building better theory will enable improved explanation of economic phenomena to aid the understanding of causation in interacting systems. In turn, this will allow more effective application to policy problems as such theory can inform intervention within these systems. With poor theory, data collection, analysis and interpretation can all be misdirected and misleading.