[washedup]

All computer simulations are models, but not all models are computer simulations. What's taught in graduate school are text-book models which are descriptive at best. I am arguing that more thought should be given to trying to develop computer simulated economies now that computing power is much cheaper. The paper I linked to you shows initial success is at least being able to describe how an economy behaves. It's worth exploring, especially when we have huge test data sets in the form of online gaming economies.

In graduate-level economics (got my masters) there is very little connection between the micro and macro world. Macro economic behaviors are emergent properties of the underlying agents who are guided by a set of incentives, and graduate economic programs generally teach a fractured system. You either apply steady-state models to the macro world or you run behavioral experiments. There is (or there was in 2010, anyway) very little emphasis on modeling both systems as one.

[noobermin]

I'm a theoretic physicist who does computer simulations of laser plasma interactions. I'm just curious, how much of a scale difference (orders of magnitude) exist between your micro and macro worlds? We deal with femtosecond (1e-15 sec) and nanosecond (1e-9 sec) dynamics by using different simulations and feeding the short time sim results into the nanosecond ones. Is such a thing possible? I'd think doing something like that would be obvious, no?