Guiding Principles

"Make it simple.Do it right. Make it plausible."

"The art of successful theorizing is to make the inevitable simplifying assumptions in such a way that the final results are not very sensitive."

Robert Solow on building theoretic models.

“Economic theories should be judged by three criteria: generality, congruence with reality, and tractability.”

– George Stigler, Essays in the History of Economics (1965)

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."

Frederic Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy, p.24

"A good economist knows the difference between the mathematical properties of a model and the messages of a model; a mathematician does not know that a model has messages. A great economist knows the circumstances in which an economic model is useful and the circumstances in which it is not; a mediocre economist thinks a model applies in all circumstances. The best economists are multilingual. They can speak graphs, words, algebra, and numbers, and they use the language best suited to the task."

Edward E. Leamer, The Craft of Economics, p.33

"The era of closed-form solutions for their own sake should be over. Newer generations get similar intuitions from computer-generated examples than from functional expressions."

Jose-Victor Rios-Rull, JME (2008).