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By Michael White | September 4th 2009 06:05 AM | 5 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Michael White

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist


... Full Bio

Not really, but Paul Krugman is laying out some criticism of economics that's in the same spirit of my recent criticisms of networks and computational biology.

"How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?":

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

The math Krugman is talking about isn't (for the most part) the same kind of math and computational methodology that I was hammering, but the spirit is the same.
I love math, and science doesn't work without it, but successful science sticks close to its empirical foundation.

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Comments

jtwitten's picture
What's funny is that Milton Friedman - viewed as the paradigmatic proponent of capitalism - is usually criticized for eschewing complex mathematics.

adaptivecomplexity's picture
Friedman comes in for praise in Krugman's piece, I think in part because Friedman didn't let a desire for formal elegance get in the way of serious thinking about real economic problems.

Gerhard Adam's picture
There's nothing wrong with complex math.  The problem is that they've never really developed a working model to apply it to.  The math can't give rise to the model.

rholley's picture
On a TV programme earlier this year, dealing with the collapse of financial institutions dealing in derivatives, etc., they said something like:

    This really is rocket science

stating that some of the leading developers of these financial models had come from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

adaptivecomplexity's picture
Of course in the case of real rocket scientists, their models actually have get something into orbit.  Nature is more unforgiving than Wall Street.

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