Evolutionary, Experimental and Agent-Based Computational Economics

". . . economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems" Milton Friedman
[Economics as taught] in America's graduate schools... bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science. Joseph Stiglitz
"Existing economics is a theoretical [meaning mathematical] system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world" Ronald Coase
We live in an uncertain and ever-changing world that is continually evolving in new and novel ways. Standard theories are of little help in this context. Attempting to understand economic, political and social change requires a fundamental recasting of the way we think. Douglass North
Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas [�] Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data. Wassily Leontief
Today if you ask a mainstream economist a question about almost any aspect of economic life, the response will be: suppose we model that situation and see what happens. Modern mainstream economics consists of little else but examples of this process. Robert Solow
Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing. Mark Blaug
"What on earth am I doing? What are we trying to accomplish as economic theorists? We essentially play with toys called "models". We have the luxury of remaining children over the course of our entire professional lives and we are even well paid for it. We get to call ourselves economists and the public naively thinks that we are improving the economy's performance, increasing the rate of growth or preventing economic catastrophes. ... As economic theorists, we organize our thoughts using what we call "models." The word "model" sounds more scientific than "fable" or "fairy tale" though I don't see much difference between them." Ariel Rubinstein