Noah Smith makes a really good point which, coincidentally is something I’ve been complaining about for a long time—despite its pretensions economics just isn’t very mathematical:
A lot of people complain about the math in economics. Economists tend to quietly dismiss such complaints as the sour-grapes protests of literary types who lack the talent or training to hack their way through systems of equations. But it isn’t just the mathematically illiterate who grouse. New York University economist Paul Romer — hardly a lightweight when it comes to equations — recently complained about how economists use math as a tool of rhetoric instead of a tool to understand the world.
Personally, I think that what’s odd about econ isn’t that it uses lots of math — it’s the way it uses math. In most applied math disciplines — computational biology, fluid dynamics, quantitative finance — mathematical theories are always tied to the evidence. If a theory hasn’t been tested, it’s treated as pure conjecture.
It’s not very surprising. Expressing ideas in mathematical symbols isn’t all there is to math. I don’t recall seeing any econ majors or grad students in the higher level math courses when I was in college and those are the guys who would be running the departments now.
Boy genius ended up as a dual math/physics major. Will ask him if there were any econ majors in the higher level math courses. Don’t remember him talking about any. Certainly a lot of computer science people.
Steve
Keep in mind that when I took both my econ and math classes was right when the transition from the old descriptive/historical approach to economics was beginning the transition to econometrics that has reached its fruition now. If I had stuck with economics, I’d’ve been on the cutting edge. And I’d’ve known some math which would be better than the numbskulls I tutored in basic statistics.
I think the dirty little secret openly discussed in comment threads at econblogs is that the tenured profs don’t have the math/stats background that the econ grad students have, and often “team up” for their work. “Team up” = assign
I don’t remember any econ majors in any of my mathematics classes past Calculus. There certainly weren’t any in my linear algebra class, and I don’t think there were in my stats classes, though I can’t be sure of the latter.
On a different but related subject I don’t know if I’ve ever told the story of the only college class I was ever kicked out of. It was Mathematical Psychology. I was kicked out for knowing too much math.
I am retired now but spent my life as an engineer. One of the first things I learned was when making presentation to my non scientific bosses was to include a few Greek letters. It worked every time.
Keynes, himswlf an accomplished mathematician was particularly critical of complex mathematics in economics. His own equations reflected this as one could understand their dynamics within minutes.
It comes down to one’s world view. The classical school implicitly (and the neoclassical school explicitly) accepts the future can be known with certainty. Hence the use of complex equations purporting to model the future probabilistically.
Keynes argued this was an illusion and the future was irreducibly uncertain. Therefore while econometrics could be applied usefully to analyze railroad traffic it could not with any precision or reliability forecast growth or price fluctuations. In fact Keynes entire critique of the self-correcting market flowed from his concept of an uncertain future and I think history has come down on his side of things.
If I haven’t made my views clear, I think that economics is a descriptive science of human behavior like anthropology (to which it is closely related) rather than a predictive one like physics. Fine-tuning is impossible.
What do I mean by “fine-tuning”? Ensuring a minimum income of, say, $20,000 isn’t a mystery. Give everybody $20,000. Increasing the income of the lowest 10% of earners by 10% is impossible. There’s too much uncertainty.
We don’t know what effect raising the minimum wage by 30% or 50% or 100% will have. There are too many variables. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand the effects. But empiricism is really the only game in town. In the final analysis it doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your theory is if the practical results differ.
As to worldview, most of the econ grad students I knew had read the Foundation trilogy (it was just a trilogy then) one too many times. Check it out. Lots of today’s economists will say that what moved them to go into economics was the Foundation stories. They’re frustrated psychohistorians. They have Hari Seldon complexes.
Yes, we need anthropologists, historians and psychologists entering the field. Unfortunately the mainstream educational programs discourage such people from applying at all. There are only four non-mainstream programs on offer in the U.S., so far as I’m aware.
“In the final analysis it doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your theory is if the practical results differ.”
I used to go argue with the libertarians at Boudreaux’s site. They explicitly and forcefully reject your argument. Proper “economic thinking” is what matters. If your economic theory is correct, you don’t need numbers to prove you are correct. I find this kind of thinking bizarre. I really couldn’t believe people actually think that way.
Steve
Also, it appears there are no econ majors in the higher math courses per genius son. It does appear that there have been one or two from finance.