Development economics in the 1950s and 1960s, as Tinbergen and Adelman saw it, was a “groping in the dark.�? Besides the limited knowledge of dynamic mechanisms, the lack of data was a severe problem for any attempt at modeling, whether macroeconomic, input-output or in the tradition of national income accounting. As concerns the three main figures of this paper – the empirical researchers Tinbergen, Chenery and Adelman – each developed their own approach to modelling: modelling in stages; modelling to capture universal patterns, and factor analysis, respectively. Tinbergen, Chenery and Adelman shared a common inductive methodology, which might rightly be called “measurement without theory,�? in the sense that there was no economic theory that could help them in organizing the available messy, and often unreliable data. Chenery saw a role for abstract mathematical models as helping inquirers to rise above such impediments, even if only temporarily, or to gain focus, as was the case with his making technical progress an exogenous variable. Tinbergen’s models of the “first stage�? were also intended to make planning for development tractable, but without mixing planning with such focusing devices. Adelman, for her part, preferred to search for and identify factors of development.

中文翻译：

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模型、测量和“通用模式”

正如廷伯根和阿德尔曼所见，1950 年代和 1960 年代的发展经济学是“在黑暗中摸索”。除了对动态机制的了解有限之外，数据的缺乏对于任何建模尝试来说都是一个严重的问题，无论是宏观经济、投入产出还是传统的国民收入核算。至于本文的三位主要人物——实证研究人员 Tinbergen、Chenery 和 Adelman——每个人都开发了自己的建模方法：分阶段建模；建模以分别捕获通用模式和因子分析。Tinbergen、Chenery 和 Adelman 共享了一个共同的归纳方法，这可能被正确地称为“没有理论的测量，”？从某种意义上说，没有经济理论可以帮助他们组织可用的混乱且通常不可靠的数据。Chenery 认为抽象数学模型的作用是帮助探究者克服这些障碍，即使只是暂时的，或者获得关注，就像他将技术进步作为外生变量一样。廷伯根的“第一阶段”模型？还旨在使开发规划易于处理，但不会将规划与此类聚焦设备混合在一起。就阿德尔曼而言，她更喜欢寻找和识别发展因素。