I'm not an Economist, my background is in Physics and CS, so my experience is anecdotal. But I was really surprised by this story, so let me share my thoughts.

I'm not an Economist, my background is in Physics and CS, so my experience is anecdotal. But I was really surprised by this story, so let me share my thoughts. Once, I was programming a game and wanted to implement a simple economical simulation in it (how goods are produced and consumed by the population, maybe some price adjustments?.. I did not want anything complex or realistic, very simple linear approximation could be more than enough, I did not want to model agents, I wanted some sort of realistically-looking Production/Consumption/Supply/Demand behavior). I asked a PhD student to give me an advice. Well, it took quite a lot of time, maybe half an hour, simply to explain the task I wanted to accomplish. Really, the whole idea of simulating things seemed to be foreign to her, and she could not really help me a lot. The economical models seemed to be almost orthogonal to the simulationist perspective. At least, this is how it looked. It seems that Economics is very much like the laws of conservation in Mechanics. It describes the system from the high-level perspective, but does not really help too much, if you want to simulate individual particles (where you need Newton's laws, for example). I have the impression that there is, probably, some intellectual predisposition among Economists. Maybe because of the way they are taught.