Some thoughts provoked by a few blogs
Some of these articles have been lingering in my spare browser tabs for weeks, so it's time to link to them and explore a few thoughts that they have stimulated. Chris Dillow asks if economics is like Feynman's onion . It's a good analogy. People, much more than physical particles, are complex. This isn't to say we can't build models of how they behave: we can and should. And while there are lots of people decrying the state of economics (having been given permission to do so again this week by The Economist ), those who think model-building is a bankrupt approach are wrong. Model-building is the essential activity of economics and perhaps its greatest contribution to the social sciences. Indeed this is why it is to similar with physics: the best physicists know, as Feynman did, that they are not looking for an ultimate answer and even if they found one, they wouldn't know it. All we can ever seek is a model that describes the world well, and keep testing it...