“It’s Computers, Stupid!” The Spread of Computers and the Changing Roles of Theoretical and Applied Economics

Abstract

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The Price of Virtue: Some Hypotheses on How Tractability Has Shaped Economic Models

“…Computational tractability, for instance the ability to run simulations, has become crucial, not only for investigating the theoretical properties of models and market-design algorithms, but also for helping researchers find new proofs. In fact, the development of marketdesign and agent-based models has challenged the separation between theoretical and empirical work itself (Backhouse and Cherrier, 2017).…”

“…Duarte (2009, 5) notes that, in the next decades, macroeconomists ended up complaining about the associated "tractability trap" (my wording), with Alan Blinder writing in 1997 that "academic macroeconomists tend to use quadratic loss functions for reasons of mathematical convention, without thinking much about their substantive implications." 22 See Backhouse and Cherrier (2017) for further references of historical work documenting shifts in computers and mathematical techniques. I thank Aurélien Goutsmedt and Francesco Sergi for helping me articulate the endogeneity in modeling choices for tractability purposes.…”

How Economists Entered the ‘Numbers Game’: Measuring Discrimination in the Us Courtrooms, 1971–1989

“…One of the programmers of SPSS testified at the trial. For a history of the impact of computerization on the development of economics since the 1970s, see Renfro (2004) and Backhouse and Cherrier (2017b).…”

How economics frames political debates: macroeconomic forecasting in the French planning commissions

“…Very quickly, the issue of programming was raised and the summer of 1967 was spent working on it. The modelers were assisted in their work by INSEE's development of computers at a time when computer science was drawing attention, if not fascination, in the administration (Breton, 1990) and in economics (Backhouse, Cherrier, 2017). As one of FIFI's creators explained in an interview, interest emerged following the purchase of two IBM computers:…”