The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think

ISBN-13: 9780521176194 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 442 str.

Mary S Morgan

Opis

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."

Recenzje

'This well-informed and beautifully written series of case studies offers the best analysis to date of how economists work with models. It should help all economists think more deeply about what they do and give others insights into the way economic reasoning works.' Roger Backhouse, University of Birmingham

Spis treści

1. Modelling as a method of enquiry; 2. Model building: new recipes, ingredients and integration; 3. Imagining and imaging: creating a new model world; 4. Character making: ideal types, idealization and the art of caricature; 5. Metaphors and analogies: choosing the world of the model; 6. Questions and stories: capturing the heart of matters; 7. Model experiments?; 8. Simulating: taking a microscope to economics; 9. Model situations, typical cases and exemplary narratives; 10. From the world in the model to the model in the world.

O autorze

Morgan, Mary S.
Mary S. Morgan, Fellow of the British Academy and Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, is Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics and University of Amsterdam. She has published on a range of topics in the history and philosophy of economics: from statistics to experiments to narrative, and from nineteenth-century Social Darwinism to game theory in the Cold War. Her previous books include The History of Econometric Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Models as Mediators (Cambridge University Press, 1999, co-edited with Margaret Morrison). She has also edited collections on measurement, policy making with models and the development of probability thinking. In the broader sphere, the collection of essays How Well Do Facts Travel? (Cambridge University Press, 2011, co-edited with Peter Howlett) marks the conclusion of a major interdisciplinary team project on evidence in the sciences and humanities. Professor Morgan is currently engaged in the project 'Re-thinking Case Studies Across the Social Sciences' as a British Academy-Wolfson Research Professor, this year as a Davis Center Fellow at Princeton University.