The process works like this: start with an informal verbal story, often one drawn from casual empiricism or from non-mainstream economic literature. Then try to build the simplest possible model that will illustrate that story. In the course of the model-building the story tends to change along with your intuition, but at the end of the process you have a simple model that is a very special case, but that makes a lot of intuitive sense and effectively gives you a language to discuss things that previously were off limits.
I could not resist comparing this to what anthropologists do, not when he wrote that he liked working from ’suggestive special cases’. It seems, however, as if the interest in case studies is where any similarities end. I thought about the problem with model building. I know that the issues we deal with as anthropologists are certainly different from the issues economists deal with, but I still can’t shake off the urge to call attention to my feeling that anthropologists don’t quite like models. It seems like we most often seek to complicate things, to add more ‘variables’ to the mix, because we understand too well how difficult it is to ascribe causality. In other words, Krugman’s goal of searching for the simple model is almost the direct opposite of what anthropologists do.
I remember discussing, recently, with a colleague who thinks that anthropologists let themselves be held back by too much detail, so much so that they are unable to contribute so much to policy formulation. I guess this post comes partly as a result of that discussion.
Comments please!
I suppose it all goes back to the goal. If you seek a “scientific” perspective on human behavior, you go for the model. If you appeciate the lessons of the case story, you go for an interpretive perspective. I know which I prefer for “my” anthropology.