How Economists Model the World into Numbers. A Review Essay on the Book by Marcel Boumans

The dominance of model-building in modern economics is far from a new finding. Marcel Boumans intends to separate himself from previous analyses by pursuing a specific focus, namely the development of a «separate methodology of models». To achieve this goal he focusses on the contributions by Jan Tinbergen, Ragnar Frisch, Trygve Haavelmo, Tjalling C. Koopmans, Herbert A. Simon, John von Neumann, Milton Friedman, Lawrence Klein, Robert E. Lucas, Finn E. Kydland, Edward C. Prescott and Irving Fisher in particular. Despite this selectivity How Economists Model the World into Numbers provides a sound reconstruction of specific methodological aspects of macroeconometric modelling. A particular strength lies in his successive treatment of the contributions of leading researchers. These are, all in all, combined with insights from methodological literature in a felicitous manner