"> Lots of models work pretty well to help you understand and predict reality despite being abstractions, but perfect competition and perfectly competitive firms is not one of them.
Okay, but then shouldn't this be your argument (preferably with details and examples) rather than a general attack on mathematical models?"
That was my argume…
"> Lots of models work pretty well to help you understand and predict reality despite being abstractions, but perfect competition and perfectly competitive firms is not one of them.
Okay, but then shouldn't this be your argument (preferably with details and examples) rather than a general attack on mathematical models?"
That was my argument, with the examples. I also included the point that internal consistency is not enough.
Please, if you are going to respond to someone's comment, try to respond to their comment and not some half read and quarter understood version of it.
Please to you. That wasn't your argument in the first comment. You wrote
> "a perfectly competitive firm" is something that does not exist, nor can exist, in the real world, and is in fact a construct to make the math easy
> we have a mathematical model about the behavior of firms that can't exist and how they price goods that we can't test
Call me pedantic if you wish, but nothing there says that models differ on how well they help one understand and predict reality despite being abstractions, and that the model of perfectly competitive firms just happens to be particularly bad at it.
We are referring to different posts; I was referring to the post you immediately responded to, not the original in the thread. I didn't make a general attack on mathematical models in the original post, however.
The original post in the thread is about how internal consistency isn't so great, specifically in the example of perfect competition models as a class of mathematical models that achieve it by tautology. Apologies for not making it abundantly obvious, or going out of my way to point out that some mathematical models are not worthless even if that one in particular that I was talking about is. I also didn't feel it necessary to point out that murder is bad, or that one shouldn't steal.
"> Lots of models work pretty well to help you understand and predict reality despite being abstractions, but perfect competition and perfectly competitive firms is not one of them.
Okay, but then shouldn't this be your argument (preferably with details and examples) rather than a general attack on mathematical models?"
That was my argument, with the examples. I also included the point that internal consistency is not enough.
Please, if you are going to respond to someone's comment, try to respond to their comment and not some half read and quarter understood version of it.
Please to you. That wasn't your argument in the first comment. You wrote
> "a perfectly competitive firm" is something that does not exist, nor can exist, in the real world, and is in fact a construct to make the math easy
> we have a mathematical model about the behavior of firms that can't exist and how they price goods that we can't test
Call me pedantic if you wish, but nothing there says that models differ on how well they help one understand and predict reality despite being abstractions, and that the model of perfectly competitive firms just happens to be particularly bad at it.
We are referring to different posts; I was referring to the post you immediately responded to, not the original in the thread. I didn't make a general attack on mathematical models in the original post, however.
The original post in the thread is about how internal consistency isn't so great, specifically in the example of perfect competition models as a class of mathematical models that achieve it by tautology. Apologies for not making it abundantly obvious, or going out of my way to point out that some mathematical models are not worthless even if that one in particular that I was talking about is. I also didn't feel it necessary to point out that murder is bad, or that one shouldn't steal.