Recall the famous quote by George E.P. Box: all models are false, but some models are useful. So there are good models: what are they? Models are abstractions that aim to highlight a particular economic mechanism rel-evant for a particular research question. They should abstract from all the features that are not important for the particular research question at hand. A good model is one that does exactly that. It follows that the model should be judged on the basis of its ability to shed some light on that particular research question. It should not be dismissed just on the basis that it is not able to explain features that are not directly related to the research question it was explicitly built to address. That would simply be unfair and not intellectually honest. Therefore, it follows that there does not exist a big all-encompassing model that can explain everything from rare events to day-to-day economic policy. There are good models for par-ticular questions.
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