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necessarily made a valuable contribution, with this particular type of model.
Page 85
Moreover, economic geographers did not reject modeling in the way that high development theorists
did. When they found that they could not produce models in which macrobehavior could be explained
from the interaction of micromotives, they essentially settled for what they could do: schematic
descriptions of the data or organizing principles that made intuitive sense and/or seemed to fit the facts
fairly well, without having the kind of deeply satisfying logic of, say, the von Thünen model. Centralplace
theory, rank-size rules, gravity equations, market potential analyses: these were certainly
modeling efforts, even if they did not go all the way to maximization and equilibrium. Admittedly,
during the 1970s there was something of an antimodel, antiquantitative backlash in economic
geography, drawing slightly on Marx and more than you might imagine on Derrida. (The giveaway
turns out to be the phrase ''post-Fordism": if you see that, it means that you are dealing with a member
of the Derrida-influenced regulation school deconstructionist geography!) But the traditions I described
in lecture 2 were hardly those of people who were unwilling to think in terms of models.
So in the case of economic geography one wonders whether mainstream economics deserves to be
faulted for an unnecessarily narrow view of what constitutes useful theory. Suppose that there is a
subject of great intrinsic importance as cities and the location of production surely are. And suppose that
there is a body of thinking about that subject that seems to make considerable sense, shed a fair amount
of empirical light, but that doesn't seem to be something we are currently able to wrap up neatly into
fully specified micromotives-and-macrobehavior models.
file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_85.html [4/18/2007 10:30:39 AM]