[9급 지방직 영어 2019년 7번]

There is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won’t ever make progress.

(A) Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there.

(B) The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: “Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.”

(C) When I say “stripped down,” I really mean stripped down. It isn’t uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact.