...Mauro Boianovsky In the late 1970s Paul Samuelson drafted the outline of a paper, never published, with a critical assessment of the theoretical innovations of postwar development economics. He found it a “vital” but essentially “not tractable” subject, with a “voluminous” and “repetitive...

... for abstract mathematical models as helping inquirers to rise above such impediments, even if only temporarily, or to gain focus, as was the case with his making technical progress an exogenous variable. Tinbergen’s models of the “first stage” were also intended to make planning for development tractable...

... economic models can be characterized as deliberate untruths. For, if judiciously selected, it is in these misrepresentations that their primary virtue lies. That is, if such a model is to be tractable analytically, it must entail oversimplifi cation of reality, often drastic oversimplifi cation...

... is incom- plete and approximations are required. They typically require models to (a) work and (b) be tractable. The rst is checked by experiment in labora- tory conditions, but perhaps more important by practical use. Experience builds by trial and error. The tractability of theory has changed dramati...

... conditions such as separability or additivity in order to obtain predictions from the theory, a process known as tractability. The limits of our ingenuity are tested not by the extraction of insights from the real world but from the stock of available mathematical knowledge. Questions of growth...

... of estimating pro- duction relations in the late 1920s and 1930s using what came to be known as the Cobb-Douglas production function (Cobb and Douglas 1928; Bid- dle 2012); by 1960 the literature of economics included numerous exam- ples of estimated Cobb-Douglas production functions.7 The tractability...

... it is not actually misleading, and that is not always knowable in advance. (Solow 1970, 2) What Samuelson was doing in his studies of classical authors was pre- cisely this: he was using their texts to construct simple models that appeared tractable and could be mapped back onto some small element...

... in Cambridge, but he never presented any of his theories mathematically, because this would have involved simplifications (to produce math- ematically tractable relationships) that were inappropriate to the real economies he was seeking to understand. Does Berdell’s representation of Malthus’s theory...

... element and an unexplained random element (cf. Haavelmo 1940, 312). His innovation was the idea that, if the dynamic element were sufficiently accurately described—a job that he assigned to a priori economic theory—the error term would conform to a tractable probability distribution. Shocks...

... of the object he cre- ated: a simple, clean, and tractable, yet fully articulated and empirically usable, artifact.3 It became the standard growth model of neoclassical macroeconomics, an “engine of research” that was easy to use, adopt, extend, and apply in a variety of different projects (see...

... they may have said” (21 1, italics in original)-a principle to which Keynes was to appeal more than once in his own defense. Robinson’s attitudes were soon to become closer to those of Keynes than to those of MarshalL’O Two questions may be asked of assumptions: “Are they tractable? and: Do...

... degrees of substitutability and complementarity.l2 Thus, a set of heuristic assumptions about the capital structure is required to allow the identification of its most essential features and to render the treatment of monetary dynamics tractable. In the Austrian view, the central problem...

... (an algebraist), Cecil C. Craig (a statistician), and Arthur Cope- land (a probabilist). One of my tasks was to attend conferences, mostly in Washington, D.C., in which applied mathematical problems were discussed by our clients in the Department of Defense and to formulate meaningful, tractable...

.... Despite numerous simplifying assumptions necessary to make the general equilibrium models; tractable,6 the simple results of the one-commodity model are not sustained. Bliss demonstrates (1975, 82) that there is no necessary inverse reladion between the rate of interest and the quantity...

... . . . in a degree exactly proportional to that benefit” is not mathematically tractable. Even with the most restrictive static models of a simple monopoly railway company and simple monopoly shipper/producers, and assuming the demand curves to be utility curves, proportionality of benefit and fare...

... of capital resulting from a small change in the corporate tax. Harberger’s model provided powerful insights, but it suffered from important limitations. Since Harberger used analytical methods to solve the model (rather than numerical ones), the model was only tractable with a limited number...

..., together with the conceptualisation of income and expenditure that go with it, that is missing from Walker’s theory, together with the simplifications concerning consumption and investment behaviour needed to render such analysis tractable. (iii) Walker has quantity adjustments as a means...

... small scale—often single equation—studies also appealed to researchers not affiliated with a large team. Marshall had devised these ideas in the first place to render tractable the analytic problems associated with the facts of the general interdependence of economic phenomena, which he understood...

... an account of the frequently cited Wanderjahre in factories in North America and Europe that made Marshall so aware of increasing returns, technical progress, and full-blooded competition. Throughout, Marshall sought realistic, analytically tractable solutions. Whitaker ex- amines Marshall’s treatment...

... an account of the frequently cited Wanderjahre in factories in North America and Europe that made Marshall so aware of increasing returns, technical progress, and full-blooded competition. Throughout, Marshall sought realistic, analytically tractable solutions. Whitaker ex- amines Marshall’s treatment...