Microeconometrics tends to be quite rigorous and easy to validate.

They won't hold up to physics levels of rigor, of course - probably a bit more at the medical studies level of rigor.

David Card, Gary Becker, McFadden, etc.

Rigor is also... there's something about letting perfect be the enemy of the good.

If noone will apply math unless you can 100% reliably reproduce controlled experiments in a lab, the only thing left is people just talking about dialectics.

The challenge is how to get as much rigor as possible.

For instance, David Card saw New Jersey increase minimum wage. You generally can't truly conduct large-scale controlled social experiments, but he saw this as interesting.

He looked at the NJ/PA area around Philadelphia as a somewhat unified labor market, but half of it just had its minimum wage increased - which he looked at to study as a "natural" experiment, with PA as the control group and NJ as the experimental group, to investigate what happened to the labor market when the minimum wage increased. Having a major metro area split down the middle allowed for a lot of other concerns to be factored out, since the only difference was what side of the river you happened to be on.

He had lots of other studies looking at things like that, trying to find ways to get controlled-experiment like behavior where one can't necessarily do a true controlled experiment, but trying to get as close as possible, to be as rigorous as is possible.

Is that as ideal as a laboratory experiment? Hell no. But it's way closer than just arguing dialectics.