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Comment by MatthiasP | Hacker News Reader

"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. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in."

Piketty T. "Capital in the 21st century", p. 36.

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Economics as a discipline is ultimately a form of humanistic understanding. The ideal of scientific rigor is certainly laudable, but it is nonetheless an ideal for the discipline in general. One of the two forms of understanding, humanistic and scientific, is not better than the other. But they require different questions and, as a result, often lead to different answers through different methods, one of which is interpretation, or, understanding the use and uses of something within a constellation of rules and history. Economics, in general, works, but we must be sure of the particular ways it works.

The discipline raises the questions of philosophy of mathematics and logic (and thus we should say language). How do mathematical models relate to the world? Is it the Tractatus, or Philosophical Investigations?

I wonder if economics students are ever assigned readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The latter part of Ray Monk's biography on him touches on many hilarious debates between him and his students, including Alan Turing, around these questions.

When you're attempting social engineering, one form is better than the other.

If your predictions consistently fail, you're not doing good science.

If you want to claim you're not doing science at all but standup comedy or literature, that's fine.

But that's not how economics is presented to the public. It's always "We must do [unpopular thing] to get [defined outcome] because [economics is truth]."

If there's no empirical basis for any of that, the entire narrative is plain political fraud.

>If your predictions consistently fail, you're not doing good science.

I agree with where you're going, but I think the better phrasing would be "If your predictions consistently fail, your scientific theory isn't very good"

Good science usually involves a lot of failure before it provides good theory.

This doesn't excuse incredible overselling of economic models by economists though.

> The ideal of scientific rigor is certainly laudable

There is no scientific rigor so there is nothing to laud. Economics is on the same level as astrology in that "math" is used to gain the appearance and legitimacy of "science".

> The discipline raises the questions of philosophy of mathematics and logic (and thus we should say language). How do mathematical models relate to the world? Is it the Tractatus, or Philosophical Investigations?

The problem has nothing to do with mathematical models. It has to do with testability and reproducibility.

> Economics is on the same level as astrology in that "math" is used to gain the appearance and legitimacy of "science".

I wasn't aware that astrology uses even the pretense of math, however I'm admittedly not well-versed in astrology.

There was a time when astronomy was only a component of astrology, and astrophysics/cosmology is what happened when science-minded astrologers figured out the whole thing couldn't work because their attempts to make ever more accurate "predictions" (soothsaying) based on ever more accurate predictions (of the positions of celestial bodies) told them the universe was arranged just a little bit differently than they'd supposed. What is now purely pseudoscience was once a proto-science; the woo was still woo, but there was actual science there as well.

for a completely diferent view on economics I recomend the book "Basic Economics"[1] written by Thomas Sowell [2] 704 pages without a single mathematical formula or graph.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

Not sure if that quotation inspires much confidence. Economics has math behind it. Subjects like Sociology have none of the rigor of math and are thus a large waste of time.

This is exactly the fallacy he is addressing. Math = rigor, so clearly the discipline which uses the most math is the most rigorous, right? But actually math is only useful when it is based on a useful model of reality. If the underlying assumptions are unfounded or faulty, then math does not help you at all.

The takeaway is that the math used in econ obscures the truth while lending a fake gravitas to pure opinion.

At least sociology is honest that they're going pure opinion.

Do you imply that philosophy and sociology as disciplines are not rigorous? This shows a very weak knowledge of those disciplines, and of maths-focused economics if you still believe that maths = rigor.

Not philosophy, but sociology yes.

The math is a red herring. It's the buried assumptions that underpin the math which is where the real bullshit usually lies.

Exactly. The answer is not less mathematics, but more empirical work.

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