Instrumental Variables (The Effect, Videos on Causality, Ep 57)

Please visit www.theeffectbook.net to read The Effect online for free, or find links to purchase a physical copy or ebook.
The Effect is a book about research design and causal inference. How can we use data to learn about the world? How can we answer questions about whether X causes Y even if we can't run a randomized experiment? The book covers these things and plenty more. These videos are meant to accompany the book, although they can also be viewed on their own.
This video relates to material found in Chapter 19 of the book.
A version of this video without background music can be found here: • Instrumental Variables...
Controlling for stuff (measured or unmeasured) to close back doors is all well and good, but why can't we just forget all of that and directly isolate the front door path we want? Randomized experiments are one way to do that, but those are often too expensive or infeasible. Enter instrumental variables, a way to take advantage of the little experiments being run all around us.