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- Title
Guy H. Orcutt's Engineering Microsimulation to Reengineer Society.
- Authors
Chung-Tang Cheng
- Abstract
This essay examines how microanalytic simulation (microsimulation) proposed by Guy H. Orcutt emerged as a tool in evaluating public policies. Inspired by the econometric work of Jan Tinbergen, young Orcutt harbored a "Tinbergen dream" in building a model covering the national economy. Early in his career, he had developed an analogue electricalmechanical "regression analyzer" to calculate statistical estimates. During the mid-1950s, he shifted to micro-level data and the Monte Carlo method, and then created the first microanalytic simulation of demographic variables. After a failed trial at the University of Wisconsin, his ambitious microsimulation finally succeeded at the Urban Institute, constituted as the Dynamic Simulation of Income Model. Since the late-1970s, microsimulation have been used to understand the economic consequences of welfare and redistributive policies. As a pretrained electrical engineer and physicist, Orcutt viewed the socioeconomic system as an electrical-mechanical network. Microsimulation was an engine designed for not only scrutinizing the system but reengineering the society.
- Subjects
MICROSIMULATION modeling (Statistics); MONTE Carlo method; DYNAMIC simulation; ENGINEERING -- Economic aspects; ORCUTT, Guy H.
- Publication
History of Political Economy, 2020, Vol 52, Issue S1, p191
- ISSN
0018-2702
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1215/00182702-8718000