Intelligent Agent Modeling in Economics

Tyler Cowen on agent-based modeling:

What can be done will be done and so people will build intelligent models for at least the next twenty years. But it's hard for me to see them changing anyone's mind about any major outstanding issue in economics. What comes out will be a function of what goes in. In contrast, regressions and simple models have in many cases changed people's minds....

In my possibly overdogmatic view, economics is most useful when its models are relatively simple and intuitive. We've run out of new models which are simple and intuitive. So the theory game is over. The standard, old data sets have been data mined to death. We're now on to the "can you build/create your own data set?" game. That game can and will last for a long time; in some ways it will favor go-getter extroverts just as the theory game favored introverts.

Read the whole thing.

I am more optimistic about agent-based modeling than Cowen is. But then again, maybe that's because I'm an extrovert?