The World in the Model How Economists Work and Think [Paperback]

This book describes the radical shift in the study of economic science; where arguing with words was replaced by reasoning with mathematical models.In the time of Adam Smith, economists used words both to describe their economic world and to argue about its laws. Nowadays, economists describe the world in pieces of mathematics and explain the phenomena of the real-world economy by reasoning with those little models. The World in the Model tells the story of this major cognitive shift in the way economic science is done, a shift involving imaginative and creative resources as well as a new mode of reasoning.In the time of Adam Smith, economists used words both to describe their economic world and to argue about its laws. Nowadays, economists describe the world in pieces of mathematics and explain the phenomena of the real-world economy by reasoning with those little models. The World in the Model tells the story of this major cognitive shift in the way economic science is done, a shift involving imaginative and creative resources as well as a new mode of reasoning.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 recenlóÚ