Consciousness Without Fallen Hope
I just finished reading a series of articles about the Sante Fe Conference that bought together the brightest minds in economics, math, physics, sociologists, anthropologists, etc. Their goal is to develop new ways to approach both scientific and social problems - to see if they can break down the silos of the departmental Universities and to find synergies amongst their disciplines.
It really worries me that economics as discipline is heavily criticized because of its strong emphasis on theories that were formulated over 100 years ago, and any new work is simply a complex mathematical extension. One physicist compared economics to Cuba, living huddled under an ideological embargo away from the rest of the world, while decades of revolutionary scientific advancements are made in other disciplines.
I don’t think they are too far off from the truth. All works in modern economics are not all so modern. They are the reproduction of a contradicting, inapplicable, simplified, assumed model with various mathematical nuances. It’s saddening to see that it has come to a point that economics cannot exist outside of textbooks without about 40 pages worth of mathematical formulas (mostly to disprove the assumptions used in the model in the first place.. haha). Then why even bother with economics?? Just have a separate set of courses called “Mathematics with Fancy Important Worldly Word Problems.”
It reminds me of the geocentrics during the Aristotle/Copernicus debate. Where the geocentrics were so grounded on their dogma and ideology that, to compensate for discrepancies in their models, they added complex retrograde motions to justify that the planets move around the earth.
Maybe this economic meltdown can send a message to all the economists out there. Wake Up! We have a huge opportunity to redefine our theories and redefine our models. This is exciting times with much work to be done. Communism is dead, Socialism is stagnant, Capitalism … well isn’t doing the greatest right now.
Lets be more creative, and may our policy follow such creativity.
April 24th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
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