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Document 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]
Document Should we completely ignore that body of thinking? I don't think so, and it speaks badly of our profession that we are so narrow-minded. I can't resist a parallel with another area of economics, the study of business cycles. Keynesian economics is, in a way, not too unlike regional science. It is a collection of plausible models without good microfoundations, like ISLM, mixed in with empirical relationships that work very well even though we don't quite know why, like Okun's law, all leavened by a few areas like consumption behavior in which models with full maximizing behavior are the norm. Regional science, whatever its academic reception, always found a ready market in the real world. Similarly, a basically Keynesian macro continues, whatever its academic status, to be the workhorse of monetary and fiscal policymaking, of forecasting and policy assessment, in the real world of events. Page 86 So what should the academic economics profession do about this unsatisfying subject admit that it is intellectually messy but continue to teach it pending a well-specified theory, or exile it on the grounds that it is not serious economics and restrict our macroeconomics classes to issues of hyperinflation and long-run growth? You know what I think: in the long run all of our models will be as neat as the von Thünen model, but in the long run… And yet what a difference a clean model makes. Consider the way I presented the various traditions in spatial economics with central-place theory, market potential, cumulative causation, and external economies as different ways of looking at the same process, in which firms are attracted to the markets and supplies they provide for each other. Did the proponents of these ideas see themselves as offering variants on a common theme? Not as far as I can file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_86.html [4/18/2007 10:30:39 AM]
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