Thursday, September 23, 2004

Another stab (like mine last spring) at why there seems to be a disproportionate fear for economics and economists: Arnold Kling puts forth a few possible reasons in his TCS article. He mentions the math barrier, but I still think that disliking the conclusions of economic thinking is one of the biggest reasons -- and can't be dealt with simply by teaching economics without math.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There is an old joke among CS types:

- The problem with Computer Scientists is that they only solve toy problems.
- The problem with Industry practitioners is that they cheat and take shortcuts
- The problem with Formal Methods proponents is they cheat to solve toy problems

Perhaps skepticism of economics is driven by the fact most economic models are vastly oversimplified to make them mathematically tractable, and thus often suspect.

-- Fazal Majid (www.majid.info)

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