Economics and Street Lights

Competition is baked into standard economic dogma, in part because perfect competition results in equilibrium dynamics, which are easy to model. - Bilal Chughtai

There’s an old joke about a guy looking for his keys under a streetlight. Another guy comes along and helps him look. After ten fruitless minutes, the second guy asks the first guy where he dropped them. He points twenty feet away and the second guy asks him, “Why are you looking here then?” He answers, “It’s where the light is.”

All of undergraduate economics is focused on modeling equilibriums (I don’t know if this is true or not for graduate level). If any state changes, it’s assumed that a new equilibrium will be found. The normal world, where every variable is constantly in flux, is waved away.