Yet another Sheep

Ariel Rubinstein has a wonderful paper in Econometrica, "Dilemmas of An Economic Theorist", on the dilemmas a economic theorist faces:

The dilemma of absurd conclusions: Should we abandon a model if it produces absurd conclusions or should we regard a model as a very limited set of assumptions that will inevitably fail in some contexts?
The dilemma of responding to evidence: Should our models be judged according to experimental results?
The dilemma of modelless regularities: Should models provide the hypothesis for testing or are they simply exercises in logic that have no use in identifying regularities?
The dilemma of relevance: Do we have the right to offer advice or tomake statements that are intended to influence the real world?

Rubinstein provides good insights on each of these points. And he raises a question everyone familiar with economic theory (the pure theory kind) should ask oneself from time to time:

However, underlying this paper is one major question that I ask myself obsessively: What on earth am I doing? What are we trying to accomplish as economic theorists? We essentially play with toys called models. We have the luxury of remaining children over the course of our entire professional lives and we are even well paid for it. We get to call ourselves economists and the public naively thinks that we are improving the economy’s performance, increasing the rate of growth, or preventing economic catastrophes. Of course, we can justify this image by repeating some of the same fancy sounding slogans we use in our grant proposals, but do we ourselves believe in those slogans?