This volume offers a preliminary report on efforts to construct mathematical models for the analysis of economic policy and other social science problems in Latin America. Specifically, the book focuses on attempts by Latin American scholars to utilize a controlled computer simulation process known as “numerical experimentation.”
In the opening sections Oscar Varsavsky, a pioneer in the field, explores conceptual and technical aspects of model-building and the experimentation technique. Then follow applications of the method: studies of economic policy in Chile and Bolivia, an examination of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and a futuristic projection of the varying consequences of three basic “styles” of economic policy-making up to the year 2000. The only historical essay describes an ambitious plan for the study of political and social change in Latin America since 1800; designed by a team of investigators at the University of Buenos Aires and the Di Tella Institute in the mid-1960s, the project has been abandoned—or greatly delayed— for both political and budgetary reasons.
Perhaps the central contribution of this book lies not so much in its advocacy of numerical experimentation, which historians have yet to use, as in its exposition of a research style. Virtually all these essays demonstrate the benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation and group collaboration. More important, they also show how mathematical model-building can reveal the logical implications of propositions or hypotheses and, in so doing, greatly enhance conceptual rigor.
