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1120 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 30 Nov 2023 \ on: Meta Econ Takeover Day 45 meta
I was always a math nerd and was a physics major in college. But I went to grad school in econ when I found out how mathy econ was and I thought it was cool to use models to predict human behavior.
It was a fun intellectual exercise, but now I am much more skeptical about the usefulness of economic models and would advocate a more holistic approach to economics which values experience, intuition, and discourse in addition to modeling and statistics.
That being said, models, math, and statistics have an important place. Disciplines that don't ground their theories in rigorous analysis also tend to go off the rails.
Disciplines that don't ground their theories in rigorous analysis also tend to go off the rails.
Yup. Or condemn themselves to irrelevance. Answering all criticisms by pointing to your deductive system is not a winning recipe.
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My background was also math and physics, before going into econ. However, I was already pretty skeptical of using the same kind of mathematics in econ that gets used in physics. I think the Austrians get that mostly right.
I do think there's a huge role for set theory and abstract algebra, though; a la Kenneth Arrow's famous work.
I mostly do econometrics in my own research. While I don't think that's the right way to understand economics, I do think it's invaluable for understanding economic history.
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