NFL Draft Validates Economics

A 2005 behavioral‑economics paper (Thaler and Cade Massey’s 'The Loser’s Curse') identified systematic mispricing in the NFL draft pick 'price chart' and predicted teams were overpaying for top picks; subsequent collective‑bargaining and team responses within a decade vindicated the paper’s practical prediction. This is a clear, public‑facing example where economic models made a falsifiable prediction about real institutional behavior and influenced institutional outcomes. — Shows how concrete, testable successes can be used to rebuild public trust in economics and to rebut the claim that economics is merely ideological.