>Given the general aversion to techie-math stuff often encountered
>among lefty students, this becomes even worse. I'm a firm believer
>in tearing down the master's house with his own tools, so I like
>using mathematics in economics...If the bourgeois economists like
>it so much, lets pin them to the wall with it.
Hmm, can you? Or is math part of the problem of bourgeois economics? Not, like I argued with Barkley the other day, that empirical work like Card & Krueger's isn't very useful, or that descriptive statistics aren't useful (I'm a heavy user myself), but the use of fancy math to represent very complicated social reality. Isn't that a symptom of trying to master something that isn't masterable with those tools? An attempt to reduce something very messy to something wrongly neat? In general, I agree with the strategy of using the master's tools - I always thought that Audre Lorde aphorism was wrong - but in this case, is the math part of the house that needs to be dismantled?
At UMass, Bowles, Gintis, and Folbre are trying to do this math thing, and it seems to me that they just end up getting captured by the discourse. A few years ago, I heard Folbre - who I generally think is quite smart, so this depressed me - give a paper modeling patriarchy using the equity holder as residual claimant model from corporate finance/governance theory. I guess she was trying to seduce the followers of Eugene Fama into feminism, but I just don't think that's going to work. Bowles & Gintis put out these models of boss-worker relations, with variables for work effort and supervisory costs - but those are completely unquantifiable things. The equations look impressive on the page, but they're built on mush. And Gintis himself has become a weird reactionary along with his embrace of math.
I'm open to arguments to the contrary - what kind of math would you use to pin the evil bastards to the wall?
Doug