Mathiness: not just a problem of macro-economics (2015)
People have been complaining for 20 years+ that economics chose the wrong tool. It needs psychology, not math. (Or, more accurately: more and less, respectively – you&#x27;ll still need math).<p>The old joke about physicists starts &quot;Consider a spherical chicken&quot;. It&#x27;s funny because it gets at the reductionism at the core of physics, and it&#x27;s even funny for physicists because they actually have been pretty successful with that model.<p>It just doesn&#x27;t work that way in economics. Even worse, the reductionism in economics is unethical, because when it registered (somewhere) that humans are not &quot;objective, utility-maximising spheres&quot; they more or less started advocating that they &#x2F;should&#x2F; be. That got us to &quot;corporations are people&quot; and 24-step daily checklists to &quot;make better use of your time&quot;. It also made fast-food the superior choice (time is money!), so at least the &quot;spherical&quot; part is coming along.<p>After this short rant, which was obviously about microeconomics and therefore off-topic, something different for macro: While he&#x27;s right that the &quot;growth&quot; debate has had more or less the same trajectory as the Grand Unifying Theory in physics, I wouldn&#x27;t discount the improvements we&#x27;ve made in other areas. Inflation, for example, is pretty well under control. People don&#x27;t appreciate that too much, but I remember how my Grandmother talked about inflation. It was basically &#x2F;the&#x2F; catastrophe of her life (Germany in the 20ies – WW2 was just a result of it).<p>So we seem to be doing something right – maybe economics, maybe politics, but certainly better.<p>I also disagree with the very last paragraph of the article where he seems to advocate dropping the scientific method for a model closer to that of the social sciences. An improved discourse would obviously be great, but he seems to be equating math with the scientific method. We can try to get at the complexities of economics with new tools and still verify the results. Ultimately, math should be able to make a comeback when it develops the tools to describe systems of this complexity. It&#x27;s a lot like the brain: it is obviously possible to describe the brain using physics &amp; math (because it&#x27;s a physical system). BUT we&#x27;re not there yet, and until we are, we get better results with the collection of heuristics called &quot;psychology&quot;