In Praise of Blindspots

The important lesson I learned from this analysis was that my conclusions depended at least as much on certain assumptions about boundary conditions as on the central assumptions of economic rationality that lie at the core of neoclassical theory. By boundary conditions I mean the assumptions that have to be made about which indirect effects of a c

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

So, I agree when you say we shouldn’t categorize the economy. We shouldn’t observe the economy and be like, “Oh, that’s a harmonic oscillator.” Yeah. “That’s an Ising model.” No. But we should absorb the data. We should observe the economy, and think in the physicist way of saying, “Okay, this is what I see. Let me think of a way of describing it.”