Contemporary mainstream economics has become concerned less with describing reality than with an idealised version of the world. However, reality refuses to bend to the desire for theoretical elegance that an economist demands from his model. Modelling itself on mathematics, mainstream economics is primarily deductive and based on axiomatic foundations. Econophysics seeks to be inductive, to be an empirically founded science based on observations, with the tools of mathematics and logic used to identify and establish relations among these observations. Econophysics does not strive to reinterpret empirical data to conform to a theorist's expectations, but describes the mechanisms by which economic systems actually evolve over time.
