Maybe. But we're a long way from establishing the kind of credible alternative in economics on our own.(Elite schools selecting their own, and all that). But math can strip down messy reality to focus on the relationships that you want to focus on. Bourgeois economists use it to focus on how the market smooths everything out into nice little intersections of curves. The best counter use of this I've seen has been from John Roemer, whose work on exploitation let me pin down exactly what economic exploitation is, without the very problematic labour theory of value. Again, he strips away the messy realities of coercion in work and money markets to get something tractable, but focuses on unequal transfers of wealth, rather than "market clearing", to get "theorems" that express worker exploitation under capitalism, as a result of unequal access to the means of production. No bourgeois economist can deny his logic or his arguments, while the more qualitative political economy can too easily be dismissed by the apologists.
While there are definitely things you can't explore well with mathematical models, they are a good tool for paring the world down to find out what you want to look at.
>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.
That's too bad. I agree that the Bowles/Gintis stuff on power in the
workplace is pretty squishy, but it is a good step after decades of not
being able to respond to mainstream economists claims on their own terms. I
don't know Gintis personally, but one of the things that attracted me to
UMass was all the work he's done over his career, and his current focus on a
more realistic model of homo economicus.
>
>I'm open to arguments to the contrary - what kind of math would you
>use to pin the evil bastards to the wall?
>
>Doug
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