The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think

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.

Author: Mary S. Morgan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 09/17/2012
Pages: 442
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.90h x 7.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780521176194

About the Author
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.

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