Mapmaking and Maps
There are a lot interesting bits in this New Yorker profile of Paul Krugman. But the part I found most appealing was the idea that economic formalization created holes – and opportunities – in our understanding of the world. The process of modeling is compared to mapmaking:
Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.
I’m very fond of the map analogy when teaching modeling to students; even 40 (or more) years into the formalization of political science, I wonder what old truths and ideas we have discarded, what opportunities exist. Some inspiration for reading old work to refine the new maps.
