There's something else. I have no objection to the use of mathematics, but I have obsderved that in economics and philosophy too, it lends itself to an essentially idle concentration on technique instead of substance. I note that the great economists, including the founders of marginalism, expressed their insights without formalism. Arrow is the only exception that comes to mind, and here I mean the insight of the Arrow Theorem, not the Arrow-Debreu model, which is just a formalization of other people's insights. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill, Veblen, Jevons. Marshall, Walras, Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Keynes, Robinson, Coase--they none of them used much if any math, despite in many cases having awesom mathematical abilities (Keynes was a distinguished probability theorist, e.g.).
Today economist departments churn out students and promote professors based on theie technical facility with math models rather than their insights into the economy. It's doubtful whether many of the graets could get to the point of giving a paper talk at a major Anglo-AMerican economics dept today. That's sad, isn't it?
--jks
>Barkley wrote:
>
> > Doug,
> > We have come a long way since Keynes' day.
> > These kinds of math techniques are exactly directed
> > at laying bare the nature of such interactions.
>
>Barkley and I have discussed this matter before on other lists.
>
>I don't think math techniques have developed in a way that invalidates
>Keynes's objection to their use in economics. Specifically, algebra cannot
>take account of the kind of interdependence to which Keynes points in the
>passage Doug quoted.
>
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