The World in the Model

by Morgan, Mary S.

• ISBN13: 9781107002975
• ISBN10: 1107002974
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-09-17
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. In format, it offers a tourist guide to economics by focusing chapters on specific models, explaining how economists create them and how they reason with them. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. This book will be of interest to economists and science studies scholars (historians, sociologists and philosophers of science). But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic, and in the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in.

Table of Contents

Modelling as a method of enquiry

Model building: new recipes, ingredients and integration

Imagining and imaging: creating a new model world

Character making: ideal types, idealization and the art of caricature

Metaphors and analogies: choosing the world of the model

Questions and stories: capturing the heart of matters

Model experiments?

Simulating: taking a microscope to economics

Model situations, typical cases and exemplary narratives

From the world in the model to the model in the world

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