The naive building economics manifesto

From research performed for two recent evaluation studies, the author translates to building economics the concepts lately introduced in naive physics. He argues that expert systems designed to advise the user in the early project planning‐design stage should be able to employ both basic economic principles and qualitative commonsense reasoning about the likely direction of change of the key variables considered, since the time factor is crucial. A toy expert system dealing with interest rate trends is analysed to show some feasible strategies that could be implemented The author is Assistant Professor of Economics in Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.