Math Ruins Everything
Julia just sent me one of Paul Krugman’s analyses of the causes of the financial meltdown: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
The whole article’s good, but I especially love this point:
… economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth… the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.
Pointedly ignoring the differences between a beautifully abstract model and the messy underlying reality that it (supposedly) represents? Well I’ve certainly never been guilty of that particular intellectual sin.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 6:41 pm and is filed under economics, math. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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