I enjoyed this short talk by famous physicist Murray Gell Mann about “beauty and truth in physics”:

The basic idea is that physics theories that turn out to be correct are often ‘beautiful’ in a mathematical sense. This means that the equations describing the theory are simple, or symmetric, or otherwise elegant in some sense.

I’m no Gell Mann, but I’ve had the same feeling once or twice in economics. Once my coauthor and I were working on a microeconomic search model. Basically, buyers have to find sellers, but buyers are uncoordinated with each other, so some sellers end up with more buyers than they can supply, and some sellers end up with no buyers, so some potential trades don’t take place due to the search frictions. We were looking at how supplying information to buyers about seller qualities can help reduce these frictions. The nice part was that, in one case, the efficiency losses due to search frictions were proportional to a freakin Cobb Douglas function of the information that was provided to buyers. Nowhere did we have any Cobb Douglas functions in our model, but it popped out somehow, so we figured it must be right.