Catastrophe and chaos theory, man. You should know the answer to that one by now, :-).
I agree that Gintis has become very strange, but I don't know that it is just the math. More the particular math, e.g. game theory. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 3:04 PM Subject: Re: kids v. economists
>Suresh Naidu wrote:
>
>>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
>