Thursday, March 13, 2014

Matt Bruenig — Piketty on Economists

To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences....
Sums it up neatly. I would just make a minor but highly significant alteration and change "childish passion for mathematics" to misdirected passion for "childish mathematics." Nothing wrong with mathematical models if they model complex adaptive systems populated with heterogenous agents. But that would not be child's play.

MattBruenig | Politics
Piketty on Economists
Matt Bruenig

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Right, Piketty's work is filled with mathematics and sophisticated statistical analysis.