&gt; But Chicago is just the opposite. It&#x27;s been criticized for being too tied up in the mathematics of it all. Chicagoans love numbers.<p>Empiricism often uses numbers and math, to be sure, but love of numbers and math is not love of empiricism: you can use math to tease out implications of your abstract, first-principles, non-empirical model as well as you can use apply it to real world observation in an attempt to confirm or refute an empirical model.<p>A criticism I&#x27;ve seen of the Chicago school has certainly been that it is more concerned with the mathematical implications of idealized assumptions and less concerned with how well those implications reflect real-world results.