Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow's Model as an Artifact by Verena Halsmayer
本书通过索洛增长模型的案例，揭示了20世纪中期经济学如何转向以数学模型为核心的研究范式，并分析了模型作为人造物的特性及其对经济政策的影响。
In the mid-twentieth century, the nature of economic reasoning underwent a dramatic change: Worldly problems and issues were addressed by unworldly mathematical objects called models.How reasoning with such objects became the dominant practice in economics, that is, its epistemic standard and disciplinary language, is excellently illuminated by Verena Halsmayer's Managing Growth in Miniature.She shows how Solow's didactic device became the paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) for how economics research should be done, and how economic policy should be casted.To clarify this new "style" of modeling, later called the MIT style of modeling, Halsmayer uses three key concepts: miniature, artifact, and phenomenotechnique.The term miniature is used to indicate that Solow's model is not a model of the world but of other models.These other models could be rather complex, such as Wassily Leontief's big science input-output models.Chapter 4, titled "Growth in Miniature," shows that Solow constructed this teaching, "talkative" model to find out about the growth dynamics of these larger complex models.The miniature afforded smallscale manipulations to raise and answer what-happens-if questions.It presented "the minimum efficient scale that allowed not only for a workable growth model but also for providing it with 'economic meaning'" (144), that is, "clear-cut stories about neoclassical causalities of growth" (163).To understand this new style of economic reasoning, Halsmayer argues that models should not be seen as abstract structures but as concrete artifacts, "deliberately made in a process that involves articulated as well as craft-based knowledge" (10).These autonomous objects can be explored, used, and manipulated, independently of the history of their construction, by others besides the modeler.And so Solow's model became the Solow model.In working with these miniatures, the economists were not dealing with an outside world, but their research was a matter of "phenomenotechnique," a concept Halsmayer borrows from Gaston Bachelard.