PRESTOPUNDIT

Truck and Barter:

Arnold Kling asks: Is trying to teach economics without math a misguided project?

As a math/stat major in college, I look at the question more broadly: To what extent could I teach anything using math?

Sure, I can pretend (with a glorious hubris) that everything I see in the real world can be represented by fully specified vectors of quantities, related by specific equations, giving stochastic or deterministic answers. I can pretend that distilling concepts into functions is the key to understanding theory, and that regression is the key to understanding history. But the truth is there's no a priori reason to expect any aspect of the real world to be simple enough (or simplifiable enough) for mathematical results to provide an accurate description (or an accurate abstract model) of reality.

Frankly, from my point of view, there is no "intrinsic" relation between math and anything ...

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