3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How much economic detail does an input-output model need to produce useful results? In this joint conference contribution, Oskar Morgenstern and Thomson M. Whitin report Princeton experiments in which two industries remain distinct while the rest of the economy becomes a single sector. These small systems often approximate selected results from a forty-four-sector model surprisingly well. The authors treat that success as a puzzle, not a universal rule: the larger model is itself an aggregate, and exact calculation cannot remove uncertainty in its underlying observations. Their distinctive combination of computational ingenuity and caution lets readers examine when selective detail matters—and why numerical precision alone cannot decide whether an economic approximation is adequate for its purpose.