Economic Culture Wars

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I notice that Krugman doesn't actually deal seriously with Kuttner's argument or indeed tell us what it is - he just dismisses it as a product of a "literary intellectuals". Oh and not bloody C.P. Snow again, that man was basically a hack.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Economics can't be a science like biology or chemistry because there are too many variables in reality and lab-like research can not recreate those variables (so many of which are actually important in the human decision making process and are different for different people) in any detail and is likely to be skewed anyway by the impact of observation and that people act differently in an 'experiment'.

Tbh, in Economics as in all social sciences we really don't know where to begin.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

While I admit that Maths is academically and logically rigorous in a way that almost no other academic disclipine is, that does not imply that its relative abscene from economics would make it shallower. Any more than any other social science disclipine would be made 'deeper' (whatever that means) by having more maths. The reason why Anthropologists rarely use complex maths is not shallowness, but because its not relevant in any way to what is being studied.

As Krugman points out himself 40-50 years ago economics was less maths-intensive, did that make it much more wrong? The evidence around us suggests not.

It is interesting though the way he draws parallels with evolutionary biology, given that while both can get at general truths both can be very blockheaded when dealing with the reality of human life as it is now (*cue autorant on the abuses of sociobiology*). Anyway it is not as if studying "three mutually catalytic chemicals" is the same thing as studying international trade or wage and price agreements. The reactions of Catalyic chemicals I suppose don't change much, so we can study them in a quasi-platonic way assuming (ignoring Hume) that the behaviours of each 'specimen' (looking for more scientific word? Bah! I hate chemistry) of the chemical studied is like or nearly like every other specimen of the same chemical. Water always evaporates at 100 degrees Celsisus at sea level (as so far tested). International trade on the other hand...