The Cost of Virtue : Some Hypotheses on How Tractability Shaped Economics

This paper seeks to convince historians that asking how and how much tractability has shaped individual and collective modeling choices in economics is a worthy question. To do so, I survey some of the few instances where economists explicitly discussed the importance of tractability in their work. I then compare their accounts with methodologists’ attempts to take into account tractability motives in the flourishing literature on models and realism. I suggest that disentangling theoretical, empirical and computational tractability might be fruitful, but also difficult. I ask how and why choices made for tractability purpose meant to be idiosyncratic and temporary often become collectively entrenched, sometimes creating “tractability traps.” I consider the existence of “tractability standards” that differ across time and fields and document how they tie to specific concepts of solutions. I conclude that virtue and cost are two sides of the same tractability coin, which accounts for its ambiguities