I feel like there are some models of how markets work that quite successfully predict macro behaviour of systems without knowing all the local individual factors?
You’re right that you’re more optimistic than me for this one. I don’t think we have good models of that kind in economics (or: I haven’t come across such models; I have tried to look for them a little bit but am far from knowing all modeling attempts that have ever been made, so I might have missed the good/empirically reliable ones).
I do agree that “we can make, in some cases, simple models that accurately capture some important features of the world”—but my sense is that in the social sciences (/ whenever the object of interest is societal or human), the features we are able to capture accurately are only a (small) selection of the ones that are relevant for reasonably assessing something like “my expected impact from taking action X.” And my sense is also that many (certainly not all!) people who like to use models to improve their thinking on the world over-rely on the information they gain from the model and forget that these other, model-external features also exist and are relevant for real-life decision-making.
You’re right that you’re more optimistic than me for this one. I don’t think we have good models of that kind in economics (or: I haven’t come across such models; I have tried to look for them a little bit but am far from knowing all modeling attempts that have ever been made, so I might have missed the good/empirically reliable ones).
I do agree that “we can make, in some cases, simple models that accurately capture some important features of the world”—but my sense is that in the social sciences (/ whenever the object of interest is societal or human), the features we are able to capture accurately are only a (small) selection of the ones that are relevant for reasonably assessing something like “my expected impact from taking action X.” And my sense is also that many (certainly not all!) people who like to use models to improve their thinking on the world over-rely on the information they gain from the model and forget that these other, model-external features also exist and are relevant for real-life decision-making.
Makes sense, I think I don’t know enough to continue this line of reasoning that sensibly!