Here’s a cool interview with Paul Krugman on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel. The interviewer asks,
Interviewer: What makes a good modeler in economics?
Paul Krugman: There are many different ways. One of the things you learn — and I think this is true for the physical sciences as well — is that there are many different personality types who work in distinct ways. My style: I am a ruthless simplifier, I pare away everything, I try to make the math disappear — it never quite does — but I’m a little model guy. I say “Here’s this huge complex subject, there’s got to be some little model that will get to the essence of it.” Sometimes there isn’t.
There are also people who are generalizers, people who will look for some general theorems, general ways that you can think about a large subject. There are people who are magnificently good at sifting through large amounts of data, finding ways to process that data and extract different conclusions. There are just very many different personalities.
There’s a certain style kind of identified with MIT, which is where I did my graduate work, that is the little model that cuts through to the essence of a complex problem, but… there are many different ways you can do that.
What it does take though… there is some requirement that you be able to step back and see things differently, to say that the way that everyone is talking about something is not actually the way you should be thinking about it.
Are you a simplifier, a generalizer, or a sifter? You can find the interview here, with the discussion about modelers at 11:14.