Pure economics should be about applying abstractions to help us understand the world. The world is pretty sophisticated, so I&#x27;m fine with mathematically sophisticated abstractions. Even when those abstractions fail intuitively, they <i>can</i> be useful and extended for other subareas of economics or are simply philosophically fascinating. More often than not though, a lot of prominent theory seems impracticable or intractably limited. This is a valid criticism.<p>Noah Smith is slightly misdirecting his complaints though. If we&#x27;re  looking at applied economics or policy, the amount of math is not intimidating to anyone who has taken a couple of years of non-introductory statistics. The most important econometrics papers of the past few years apply basic regressions with only a few additional valid statistical techniques.