Economic models as exploration devices
Résumé
In her book
The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think
, Mary Morgan
takes us on a fascinating journey that spans two centuries of the history of economics and
delves into the details of a number of economic models. The argument of the book is clear:
to understand what economists do, Morgan claims, one should look into their practice and
their tools; the practice in question is that of modelling, and the tools are what economists
call models. The material presented in the book is very rich and providing a synthesis of it
would be a difficult task that I will not attempt to tackle here. Instead, I will focus on a few
examples where the argument of the book finds a powerful illustration and at the same
time raises a number of questions which are relevant not only for historians of economics,
but also for social scientists who are interested in the making of economics as a science
and a profession, and of ‘the economy’ as an object of scientific inquiry and political intervention.