, Columnist
What's Wrong With 'Mathiness' in Economics?
Critic says it's a cover for lazy thinking.
Math or magic tricks?
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Once upon a time economists made their arguments in long, discursive, often contradictory books about pin factories and newspaper beauty contests. Verbally oriented people like me tend to extol those days, but to most modern economists they were the dark ages.
In the 1940s Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology brought enlightenment, in the form of elegant mathematical treatments of the major concepts in economics.1432144645160 Most of these ideas were inherently mathematical anyway, he argued in the introduction to his “Foundations of Economic Analysis,” first published in 1947, which meant that trying to express them in narrative form involved “mental gymnastics of a peculiarly depraved type.”