Dani Rodrik is a Turkish economist best known for his contributions to economic development. This post is 4 quotes from his book, Economics Rules (2015).
1. "Rather than a single, specific model, economics encompasses a collection of models. The discipline advances by expanding its library of models and by improving the mapping between these models and the real world. The diversity of models in economics is the necessary counterpart to the flexibility of the social world." (page 5)
2. "What are economic models? The easiest way to understand them is as simplifications designed to show how specific mechanisms work by isolating them from other, confounding effects." (page 12)
3. "Efforts to construct large-scale economic models have been singularly unproductive to date. To put it even more strongly, I cannot think of an important economic insight that has come out of such models." (page 39)
4. "Eventually, we developed a decision tree that helped us navigate across potential models... We would start at the top of the tree by asking whether the constraints on investment were mainly on the supply side or on the demand side... At each node of the decision tree, we tried to develop informal empirical tests to help us select among models that would send us down different paths." (page 89)
(original version from July 2017)
