Morgan, Mary S. 2012., The World in tie Model: How Economists Work and Think Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. xvii + 421 Pages. $44.99

摘要

Mary Morgan's book, The World in the Model, is an excellent survey of the history of how modeling came to be the dominant method of economic science. It demonstrates the value of the history of economic thought for the practice of economics: economists who read it will, I think, have a much better understanding of what modeling is all about. It reinforces for me something I learned from R. G. Collingwood, which is that to fully understand some subject, one must understand its history: you can know all about the state-of-the-art for some field, but until you grasp why it became the state-of-the-art, and what the competing alternatives were, you only know half the story.