A lot of my work at the moment is bound up with a model of the Murray-Darling River system. As all students of economic methodology know, such models involve more or less unrealistic assumptions designed to allow us to calculate some results while maintaining some connection with reality. One tricky issue in the model, and in reality, is what to do about demand for water for residential use in Adelaide. A member of my research team (who shall remain nameless) has proposed a drastic simplifying assumption, with a very pleasing implication
Here are the model results excluding Adelaide.
I have assumed that Adelaide doesn’t exist.
Therefore the Lions actually won 4 straight.
if only!
John Quiggin 
If Adelaide didn’t exist the Lions would still be Fitzroy.
Reminds me of an old physicist’s joke (so old I forget the exact wording, only the punchline, so this is reinvented):
A horse trainer asked a biologist, an engineer and a theoretical physicist each to invent something that would make his horses go faster.
A week later they all gathered to compare results. “What have you got for me?” asked the trainer of the biologist.
“After analysing the equine metabolism, I have genetically engineered this super-hay that will make your horses run 11% faster”
The trainer was very impressed, and thanked the biologist for her effort. He then turned to the engineer and asked what he had come up with.
“I examined the track surface and the horses’ hooves and from that was able to design a better horseshoe shape that should shave 7% off the horses’ times”.
The trainer was equally impressed. Finally, he asked the theoretical physicist what he had come up with.
“Well, I sweated for days over a solution to the general problem. When that led nowhere I tried all kinds of approximations and perturbative techniques, all of which also failed. However, I am pleased to report that I have found an exact solution for a spherically symmetric horse!”
if adelaide didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be enough support for the AFL and you silly northerners would have drowned the market with your silly rugby leagues and so euan’s assertion is even more true!
and an apology to you john, as i would very much have liked to seen you at the festival of ideas but i don’t think i will be able to make it! best of luck though.
I’m not a betting man but I would suggest to anon from the past, that a market man would have simply maximised his utility. A Holden Rodeo perhaps?
theo, IIRC the VFL had a Sydney team before an Adelaide team. If there was no Adelaide then the VFL would still have expanded north through Sydney 😉
Then again, Carlton would have been screwed in the 80s without South Australian talent to pilfer – but I am prepared to sacrifice Adelaide to ensure Carlton’s irrelevance.
Go the Swannies.
But if you take the assumptions out of economics, then doesn’t the dismal science simply become dismal?
I remember reading a bound collection of old school magazines, which contained a couple of (reportedly) accurate 19th century answers to exam questions. One was answering a question about how the juice would spread through a pie when it was cooked. The answer began, “assuming the pie is less than 30 feet high…”