>Doug seems to be laying low on this one
Only because I'm about to ship an LBO off to the printer.
In the meanwhile, someone sent me (offlist) this quote from Keynes's General Theory. More tomorrow.
Doug
----
> The object of our analysis is, not to provide a machine, or method of blind
> manipulation, which will furnish an infallible answer, but to provide
> ourselves with an organised and orderly method of thinking out particular
> problems; and, after we have reached a provisional conclusion by isolating
> the complicating factors one by one, we have then to go back on ourselves
> and allow, as well as we can, for the probable interactions of the factors
> among themselves. It is a great fault of symbolic pseudo-mathematical
> methods of formalising a system of economic analysis, such as we shall set
> down in section VI of this chapter, that they expressly assume strict
> independence between the factors involved and lose all their cogency and
> authority if this hypothesis is disallowed; whereas, in ordinary discourse,
> where we are not blindly manipulating but know all the time what we are
> doing and what the words mean, we can keep 'at the back of our heads' the
> necessary reserves and qualifications and the adjustments which we shall
> have to make later on, in a way in which we cannot keep complicated partial
> differentials 'at the back' of several pages of algebra which assume that
> they all vanish. Too large a proportion of recent 'mathematical' economics
> are merely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest
> on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and
> interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful
> symbols. (General Theory, pp. 297-8)