ABSTRACT
Autistic economics is rightly held in disregard by an increasing number of people. Unfortunately, it has sullied the reputation of all kinds of formal social modeling by association. On the other hand, there is sociology and discursive social theory, but here there is a huge gap between its thorough and detailed observation and its abstract theoretical terms. I suggest that the way forward is not to abandon all types of formal modeling, but rather to use expressive computational systems to build descriptive models of observed dynamic processes. This aims to combine the relevance and realism of social observation with the rigor of formal computational models (Moss, 1999). This is a bottom-up attempt to bridge the gap and move towards a science of social phenomena (see Moss et al., 2001) for a discussion of this). This is a consequence of accepting that economics will have to be more like biology, which employs lengthy observation and description before modeling, than physics (or, at least, than the economist’s perception of physics). This is what some of the researchers in the new field of social simulation are attempting to do (for an insight into this field see JASSS1).
