523) Os economistas e a matematica...

Trecho da trajetoria intelectual de Lord Skidelsky (neste link):

[T]he chief source of authority in economics is mathematics. Mathematics is hailed as critical to the process of discovery, but its main use, it seems to me, is to establish the the intellectual authority of economists. (I say this with some feeling because my maths was never nearly good enough for economics. I did try to improve it, but that is another story, best told by my wife.) Economists use mathematics in an attempt to make precise what is necessarily vague. Keynes famously said, ‘It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong’. Most economists would disagree. They might agree that it is better to be precisely right than precisely wrong, but better to be precisely wrong than vaguely right, because only a precise hypthesis can give rise to a precise (testable) counter-hypothesis. Progress is assured if each successive hypothesis is only marginally less wrong than its predecessor. This is fine if one forgets that economics is a policy-machine, and that immense damage can be done by applying policies which are ‘precisely wrong’ rather than ‘vaguely right’.

Most economists I know suffer from ‘mathematics anxiety’, the fear that their maths is not up to scratch. Most of their time is spent acquiring and then maintaining their mathematical techniques in competitive readiness. This has a doubly crippling effect on their creativity: they have little time to think about much else and they are forced to repress any intuitions that are not mathematically tractable. All writing for newspapers carries a risk to academic reputation, but academic economists have virtually stopped addressing the public, since they dare not to think outside their mathematical boxes.