The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
I usually view economic modeling as a more asymmetric activity than, modeling in physics. In physics, models are used to both understand why something happened or happens, and predict what will happen in future circumstances - the twin pieces of understanding and prediction. This is probably a biased view on my part, or a woeful lack of knowledge of the predictive power of economic modeling, but it seems to me that most economic models I read about are more useful in explaining the past. Any extrapolation of the model into the future basically depends on assuming similar conditions. Physics models are often tested by finding out what they predict for future situations under different conditions. (I am not including econometric modeling here, which I consider to be a qualitatively different activity - it is modeling that is more empirical in the sense that data crunching is used to establish the coefficients of the model equations.)
Again, my opinion may be totally nearsighted. If it is, let me know.
I write this because of a recent book titled The Marketplace of Christianity by R. Ekelund, Jr., R. Hebert, and R. Tollision, which was described in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Nov. 3, 2006, page A13) In the book the authors use economic analysis to describe such things as the number of different Christian churches through the centuries and the different acceptance rates of the Protestant Reformation.
Some of the models, at least as reported by the Chronicle, seem very far-fetched - a huge, Procrustean stretch, if you will.
Return to Article
