What is science? (first version)

 

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Claude Monet, View At Rouelles, Le Havre

(Update: I realize that there are some problems with my definition of science in this post. The revised version of this post can be found at this link: What is science?)

What is science? This is a very hard question. Many philosophers have tried to establish their own criteria to separate science from non-science. The problem with the word 'science' is everyone has their own internal idea of what this word should mean. Here is my definition:

Science is the systematic analysis of reality

This is not a precise definition because the word 'systematic' is subjective. One could even argue that all language and sentence structure is systematic therefore any statement could be considered scientific. Therefore, I believe drawing a strict boundary is impossible between science and knowledge. But I still think it's important to place meaning to the word 'science' because it articulates a particular type of knowledge. The concept of science is a real thing and deserves its own word.

Many people think that science has to do with proven facts. I disagree with this for two reasons. First, the word 'fact' creates too of high of a standard for what science is. I philosophically believe there are no proven facts (except the cogito). For example, you cannot be 100% be sure that the sun will come up tomorrow because there could be a supernova or black swan event. Second, science is more of a process than a finished product. By limiting science to only facts, a person in lab testing unproven theories is not doing science. Instead, we should think of science as trying to paint a detailed picture of reality.

Where does astrology fit into my definition? Astrology does not qualify as science because it is incompatible with much of the existing evidence we already know about reality. As long as an endeavor is oriented toward explaining reality in a systematic manner, I believe it qualifies as a science.

The rest of this post is a collection of definitions of science from philosophers. I agree most with the definitions provided by Paul Feyerabend and Larry Laudan.

Definitions of science from philosophers

Karl Popper (1902-1994)
1. "...statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations." (Conjectures and refutations. The growth of scientific knowledge, 1962)

Thomas Kuhn (1902-1996)
2. "...the role in scientific research of what I have since called 'paradigms'. These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962)

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994)
3. "...the separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them." (Against method, 1975)

Larry Laudan (1941-now)
4. "...there is no demarcation line between science and non-science, or between science and pseudo-science, which would win assent from a majority of philosophers. Nor is there one which should win acceptance from philosophers or anyone else." (The Demise of the Demarcation Problem, 1983)

Paul Thagard (1950-now):
5. "A theory of disciplines which purports to be scientific is pseudoscientific if and only if it has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time and faces many unsolved problems; but the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in the relation to others and is selective in considering confirmation and disconfirmation." (Quoted in Science Education by John Gilbert)

William Cecil Dampier (1867-1952)

6. "[Science is] ordered knowledge of phenomena and of the relations between them." (Wikipedia)

Marshall Clagett (1916-2005)

7. "[Science is] first the orderly and systematic comprehension, description and/or explanation of natural phenomena and secondly, the mathematical and logical tools necessary for the undertaking." (Wikipedia)

David Pingree (1933-2005)

8. "Science is a systematic explanation of perceived or imaginary phenomena or else is based on such an explanation. Mathematics finds a place in science only as one of the symbolical languages in which scientific explanations may be expressed." (Wikipedia)

Fundamentals of knowledge

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Photo license: CC BY-SA 3.0

This post is a collection of quotes about knowledge. There are 60 quotes divided into 9 sections:

A. Meditation leads to higher understanding (7)
B. Systematic analysis organizes our thinking (6)

C. Distraction is the enemy of knowledge (4)

D. Knowledge is a collection of puzzle pieces (7)
E. Language is a representation of knowledge (9)
F. Reality is the perfect model (5)
G. There are a few absolute facts and everything else is uncertain (6)
H. Be skeptical of commonly held beliefs (4)
I. The mainstream is often wrong (8)
J. Innovation is fun (4)

A. Meditation leads to higher understanding

Rembrandt (1606-1669, artist)

1. "Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know." (Quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts by Tyron Edwards)

Isaac Newton (1642-1726, physicist)
2. "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait until the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." (Quoted in Biographia Britannica)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist)
3. "There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them." (On the Method of Theoretical Physics, 1933)

George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788, philosopher)

4. "Genius is nothing else than a great aptitude for patience." (La visite a Buffon, ou Voyage a Montbard)

Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1732, biologist)

5. "A man has always to be busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished." (Brainy Quote)

John Locke (1632-1704, philosopher)

6. "We are the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment." (Hand Book: Caution and Counsels)

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, philosopher)

7. "Reason... requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another." (Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784)

B. Systematic analysis organizes our thinking

Hesiod (around 700 BC, poet)

8. "It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human and disorder is our worst enemy." (AZQuotes.com)

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)

9. "Eventually, Aristotle appeared among the Greeks. He improved the methods of logic and systematized its problems and details. He assigned to logic its proper place as the first philosophical discipline and the introduction to philosophy." (1377, Muqaddimah)

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980, anthropologist)
10. "As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science." (Culture Contact and Schismogensis, 1935)

Thomas Edison (1847-1931, inventor)

11. "I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true." (Talks with Edison)

Ernst Mayr (1904-2005, biologist)
12. "Biological classifications have two major objectives: to serve as a basis of biological generalizations in all sort of comparative studies and to serve as key information storage system." (Quoted in Ontological foundations in knowledge organization)

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895, biologist)

13. "The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind." (Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature, 1863)

C. Distraction is the enemy of knowledge

Charles Beard (1874-1948, historian)
14. "When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." (Brainy Quote)

Paul Dirac (1902-1994, physicist)
15. "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things." (The inadequacies of quantum field theory)

Edward Titchener (1867-1934, psychologist)
16. "Knowledge is the product of leisure. The members of a very primitive society have no time to amass knowledge; their days are fully occupied with the provision of the bare necessities of life." (An Outline of Psychology, 1916)

Henry David Thoreau (181701862, philosopher)

17. "I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those with are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate." (Life with Principles, 1863)

D. Knowledge is a collection of puzzle pieces

Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher)

18. "Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems." (Discourse on Method, 1637)

Linus Pauling (1901-1976, chemist)
19. "Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly." (Brainy Quote)

Monsignor Georges Lemaitre (1849-1934, astronomer)

20. "Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity... The previous successes give us confidence in the future of science: we become more and more conscious of the fact that the universe is cognizable." (Today in Science History)

Louis de Broglie (1892-1987, physicist)
21. "Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict." (Dialectica Volume 2, 1948)

Edward Teller (1908-2003, physicist)
22. "We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding." (Science and Morality, 1998)

Talcott Parsons (1902-1979, philosopher)
23. "Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems." (Brainy Quote)

Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882, chemist)
24. "Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one mad. It gives me the impression of a primeval forest full of the most remarkable things, a monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape, into which one may well dread to enter." (Today in Science History)

E. Language is a representation of knowledge

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1911, linguist)
25. "Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula." (Cours de linguistique generale)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher)
26. "Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)

Ernest Rutherford (1871-1944, physicist)
27. "An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid." (Quoted in Einstein: The Man and His Achievement )

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679, philosopher)

28. "Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by speech." (The Leviathan, 1651)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher)
29. "We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science." (On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, 1873)

Pierre Duhem (1861-1916, physicist)
30. "A symbol is not properly speaking, either true or false; it is rather something more or less well selected to stand for the reality it represents, and pictures that reality in a more or less precise, or a more or less detailed manner." (The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, 1906)

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963, sociologist)
31. "When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings." (Brainy Quote)

Rachel Carson (1907-1964, biologist)
32. "If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry." (National Book Award for Nonfiction speech, 1952)

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903, sociologist)

33. "How often misused words generate misleading thoughts." (Brainy Quote)

F. Reality is the perfect model

Albertus Magnus (1200-1280, philosopher)

34. "Nature must be the foundation and model of science; thus Art works according to Nature in everything it can. Therefore, it is necessary that the Artist follows Nature and operates according to her." (De Vegetabilibus)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519, inventor)
35. "Human subtlety... will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous." (Quoted by The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Rudolf Flesch)

John von Neumann (1903-1957, mathematician)
36. "Truth.. is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations." (Quoted in The Works of the Mind by R. B. Heywood)

Simon Schama (1945-now, historian)
37. "Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct an ideal world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation." (Dead Certainties, 1991)

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831, philosopher)
38. "The enquiry into the essential destiny of Reason as far as it is considered in reference to the World is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World?" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1832)

G. There are a few absolute facts and everything else is uncertain

Rene Descartes (1596-1650, mathematician)
39. "I think, therefore I am." (Le Discours de la Méthode, 1637)

David Hume (1711-1776)
40. "In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence... A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)

Antoine Lavoisier (1743- 1794, chemist)

41. "The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof." (Rapport des commissaires charges par le roi de l'exemen du magnetism animal, 1784)

Christian Huygens (1629-1695, mathematician)

42. "There are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgement." (Cosmotheoros, 1695)

Voltaire (1694-1778, writer)

43. "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one." (Letter to Frederick William, 1770)

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827, mathematician)

44. "Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems." (Wikiquote)

H. Be skeptical of commonly held beliefs

Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040 CE, philosopher)

45. "...if learning the truth is the goal, one is to make themselves an enemy of all that they read, and applying their mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side." (Quoted in Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys)

Montesquieu (1689-1746)

46. "Nothing is a greater obstacle to our progress in knowledge, than a bad performance of a celebrated author; because, before we instruct we must begin with undeceiving." (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748)

Denis Diderot (1713-1790, writer)

47. "In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go." (On the Interpretation of Nature, 1753)

Karl Popper (1902-1994, philosopher)
48. "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963)

I. The mainstream is often wrong

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, philosopher)

49. "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." (1819, The World as Will and Representation)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, musician)

50. "I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings." (Brainy Quote)

Max Planck (1858-1947, physicist)
51. "New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and united all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." (Address on the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, 1936)

Alexander Fleming (1881-1955, biologist)
52. "It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual." (Wikiquote)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519, inventor)
53. "Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy - on experience, the mistress of their Masters. They go about puffed up and pompous, dressed and decorated with [the fruits], not of their own labours, but of those of others. And they will not allow me my own. They will scorn me as an inventor." (Quoted by The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Rudolf Flesch)

Bruno Latour (1947-now, philosopher)
54. "If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term." (Brainy Quote)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (18112-1881, writer)

55. "Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it." (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 1877)

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873, philosopher)

56. "Persons of genius, it is true, are, and always like to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom." (On Liberty, 1859)

J. Innovation is fun

Isaac Newton (1642-1727, physicist)

57. "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." (Quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton)

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943, physicist)
58. "I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything." (Quoted in Marconi and Tesla: Pioneers of Radio Communication)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, psychologist)
59. "I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated with - all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." (Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 1900)

Marie Currie (1867-1934, physicist)
60. "I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in their laboratory is not only a technician: they are also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress them like a fairy tale." (Madame Curie: A Biography)

Critique of academic economics

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Jeremy Barande

Photo license: CC BY-SA 3.0

This post is a collection of quotes critiquing academic economics. There are 64 quotes divided into 10 sections.

A. Academic economics did not predict the 2008 financial crisis (7)

B. Academic economics devalues things it can't codify (8)

C. Non-academic analysis is sometimes more accurate (5)

D. Academic economics should focus more on economic history (8)

E. Academic economics should focus more on current events (10)
F. Academic economics provides an outline to a complicated reality (8)
G. Academic economics often forgets that every economy is unique (4)

H. Academic economics focuses too much on general theories (5)

I. Academic economics uses esoteric language (5)

J. Academic economics overrates mathematical models (4)

A. Academic economics did not predict the 2008 financial crisis

George Akerlof (Nobel Prize 2001)
1. "There's actually a signal that such a black hole does exist because there wasn't anything in the economics profession that was detailing what was going to happen when we got into the great recession." (AEA Webcast. Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Curse of the Top Five)

Michael Lewis
2. "[Michael] Burry said, 'I was in a state of perpetual disbelief. I would have thought that someone would have recognized what was coming before June 2007. If it really took that June remit data to cause a sudden realization, well, it makes me wonder what a 'Wall Street analyst' does all day." (The Big Short)

Lars Peter Hansen (Nobel Prize 2013)
3. "I believe that the recent financial crisis exposed gaps in our knowledge." (AEA Webcast. Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Curse of the Top Five)

Alan Jay Levonovitz
4. "Unlike engineers and chemists, economists cannot point to concrete objects (cell phones and plastic) to justify their high valuation. They can't even point to the predictive power of their theories. They failed to predict the 2008 crisis." (The New Astrology, Aeon)

Robert Johnson
5. "In 2009, Jeffrey Sachs said to me 'I feel ashamed to be an economist because I didn't know what a credit default swap was and it proved to be very important.'" (How the Economics of the Economics Profession Resists New Thinking. YouTube)

Jean-Claude Trichet
6. "Macro models failed to predict the crisis and seemed incapable of explaining what was happening to the economy in a convincing manner." (Reflections on the nature of monetary policy, non-standard measures and finance theory)

Jean Tirole (Nobel Prize 2014)
7. "Failure to foresee or prevent the financial crisis is a sore reminder of hubris. True enough, we are to work on most of its ingredients but like a virus that keeps mutating, new dangers emerged when we thought we understood and avoided existing ones." (Nobel Banquet 2014 - Speech by Jean Tirole. YouTube)

B. Academic economics devalues things it can't codify

Peter Radford
8. "Economists have limited their options by reducing their subject to that set of issues most easily modeled according to the disciplines' self referential code of modeling." (Why Mainstream Economic Models Make Little Sense)

James Heckman (Nobel Prize 2000)
9. "Economics... is vulnerable in the following sense that if evidence is presented in anecdotal form or they say this is just descriptive, that is a killer in a lot of top journals." (How the Economics of the Economics Profession Resists New Thinking. YouTube)

George Akerlof (Nobel Prize 2001)
10. "What I'm most worried about is what we don't see. I'm worried about the analysis that is never seen, that never becomes a paper and it doesn't become a paper because it can't be a paper. It can't become a paper because that's not what a paper in economics is all about." (AEA Webcast. Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Curse of the Top Five)

Paul Ormerod
11. "Much of this knowledge is held at decentralized levels in tacit form which is hard or even impossible to codify." (The future of economics uses the science of real life social networks)

Rob Johnson
12. "The tribal practice of what constitutes valid evidence and not can influence what people will study and leave aside." (How the Economics of the Economics Profession Resists New Thinking. YouTube)

Anma Silim
13. "The lack of narrative around innovation is one of conventional economic theory's greatest flaws." (What is New Economic Thinking?)

Robert Skidelsky
14. "Most economics students are not required to study psychology, philosophy, history or politics... They are never given the mental tools to grasp the whole picture." (Economists versus the Economy)

Gary Saul Morson, Morton Shapiro
15. "Economic models (whether mainstream, behavioral or neuro) typically leave out culture because culture cannot be quantified specified in a lab experiment or discovered in neurons." (Cents and Sensibility)

C. Non-academic analysis is sometimes more accurate

Ha-Joon Chang
16. "People that are not professional economists can have some judgements on economic issues. Sometimes their view can be better than professional economists because they may be more rooted in reality and less narrowly rooted." (Economics for Everyone RSA animate. YouTube)

Mark Skousen
17. "I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics watch out." (Brainy Quote)

Muhammad Yunus
18. "I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn't have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real life economics of a poor person's existence." (Brainy Quote)

James Heckman (Nobel Prize 2000)
19. "Did I need a Markov switching model to tell me about the stock market meltdown in 1987 or 2007? We had newspaper accounts. We had journalistic accounts. And I think the profession has had a real difficulty utilizing all these sources of information including observer reports. I mean literally you talk to people on the street." (How the Economics of the Economics Profession Resists New Thinking. YouTube)

James Heckman (Nobel Prize 2000)
20. "I've worked on China and trying to look at what technical change is in China. If you were to use 20 year old data sets, it's a waste of time. It's much better to actually go the sites in Shanghai and further in the interior to see what the technologies are, who is actually engaged and what kind of investment is being made. Those anecdotal accounts are things that banks do, what business school people do but it's not what a real economists does." (How the Economics of the Economics Profession Resists New Thinking. YouTube)

D. Academic economics should focus more on economic history

Paul Samuelson (Nobel Prize 1970)
21. "My notion of a fruitful economic science would be that it can help us explain and understand the course of actual economic history. A scholar who seriously addresses commentary on contemporary monthly and yearly even in this view, practicing the study of history - history in its most contemporary time phasing." (2003 interview with Paul Samuelson)

Howard Davies
22. "We all have good reason to be grateful that Ben Bernanke is an expert on the Great Depression..." (Economics in Denial)

Stanley Fischer
23. "I think I've learned as much from studying the history of central banking as I have from knowing the theory of central banking and I advise all of you who want to be central bankers to read the history books." (Humanitas: Stanley Fischer at the University of Oxford Lecture. YouTube)

William Ashley
24. "The historical method tries to free their minds at the outset of all priori theories and to see how they actually have been..." (An Introduction to English Economic History, 1888)

John Cochrane
25. "Economics should be much better at being the ark for simple lessons of economic history and experience. Alas our current professional training makes us pretty terrible at this." (Russ Roberts on Economic Humility)

James Heckman (Nobel Prize 2000)
26. "Economic history has suffered a big beating. Economic historians are typically slow to get things out. They do these large scholarly studies. The tenure clock works against them and the publication journal works against them." (How the Economics of the Economics Profession Resists New Thinking. YouTube)

Tyler Cowen
27. "Overall I find that history and theory laden observation tend to be the forms of evidence which have convinced me the most." (Can economics change your mind)

Andy Haldane
28. "Cycles in money and bank credit are familiar from centuries past and yet for perhaps a generation, the symptoms of this old virus were left untreated... The symptoms should have been all too obvious from history." (What have the economists ever done for us?)

E. Academic economics should focus more on current events

Asit Biswas, Julian Kircherr
29. "Practitioners very rarely read articles published in peer reviewed journals. We know of no senior policymaker or senior businessman who ever read regularly peer reviewed journals." (Prof, no one is reading you)

Kurt Bills
30. "Discovering various economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works." (Brainy Quotes)

Ha-Joon Chang
31. "People graduate without even knowing the GDP of their country." (Talks at Google. YouTube)

Asit Biswas, Julian Kircherr
32. "Professors are not shaping today's public debates or influencing policies even though they may be some of the most talented thinkers." (Prof, no one is reading you)

Robert Shiller (Nobel Prize 2013)
33. "What is the world going to look like in 50 years? I'm worried. It should be a big concern to the profession of economics." (What are the challenges for the next generation?)

Eric Beinhocker
34. "Students are providing an important pushing force rejecting curricula that paints abstract imaginary worlds and tells them little about the problems that will shape their future." (The Radical Remaking of Economics)

Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, Zach Ward Perkins
35. "The biggest economic catastrophe of our times wasn't mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn't have any relevance to learning it... We were memorizing and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple choice questions." (The Econocracy)

Unlearning Economics
36. "In practice, this vision of the economy detracts attention from important social issues and can even serve to conceal outright abuses." (No, Criticizing Economics is not Regressive)

Stephen King
37. "Young economists arrive in the financial world with little or no knowledge of how the financial system operates. This is a matter of collective guilt. Economic models typically assume the financial system is a black box." (Quoted in What's the use of economics?)

Gary Saul Morson, Morton Shapiro
38. "Aristotle long ago pointed out, one needs a fundamentally different sort of reasoning inasmuch as actual cases have features no theory can anticipate. One needs judgement, wisdom and experience. In practical reasoning, one begins with a deep understanding of the specific situation and reasons from there." (Cents and Sensibility)

F. Academic economics provides an outline to a complicated reality

Alfred Marshall
39. "Nature's action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending it is simple and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions." (Principles of Economics, 1890)

Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize 2001)
40. "The world is so complex to try to simplify it into a few mathematical equations is an enormous achievement. The question always is, what are you leaving out? If it gets too narrow, the blinders may rule out things that are really important." (Joseph Stiglitz on what makes a good economist. YouTube)

Unlearning Economics
41. "In the realm of international trade, economists have been all too inclined to support trade deals - often quite vociferously on the basis of simple ideas like comparative advantage while ignoring the actual details of the trade details." (No, Criticizing Economics is not Regressive)

Friedrich Hayek (Nobel Prize 1974)
42. "I believe it is only microeconomics which enables us to understand the crucial functions of the market process: that it enables us to make effective use of information about thousands of facts of which nobody can have full knowledge." (Coping with Ignorance, 1978)

Jedrzej Malko
43. "The cognitive value of bringing all dimensions of social reality under one common denominator is negative. The search for any one prime mover, the true and hidden structure or some general logic of history is always harmful. The attraction of simple answers lies not in what they reveal about the world but in how much they hide from us, making life less complicated than it should be." (Jedrzej Malko Demystifies Economic Concepts in His Book 'Economics and its Discontents')

Justin Wolfers
44. "More than any other economics I know, [Deaton] understands that to get the big picture right you've got to get all the small details right too." (Why Angus Deaton Deserved the Economics Nobel Prize. New York Times)

Gary Saul Morson, Morton Shapiro
45. "Joe Mokyr's 'The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850' explains the rise of Britain to economic preeminence through a complex plurality of factors irreducible to any one of them." (Cents and Sensibility)

Jean-Baptiste Say
46. "It is, perhaps, a well founded objection to Mr. Ricardo, that he sometimes reasons upon abstract principles to which he gives too great a generalization." (A Treatise on Political Economy, 1832)

G. Academic economics often forgets that every economy is unique

Friedrich Engels
47. "The conditions under which men produce and exchange vary from country to country and within each country again from generation to generation. Political economy therefore cannot be the same for all centuries and for all historical epochs." (Anti-Duhring, 1877)

Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman
48. "In the past there were more course on comparative economic systems contrasting capitalism with socialism, French, Scandinavian and British models." (Wanted Worldly Philosophers. New York Times)

Ha-Joon Chang
49. "In Singapore, 90% of land is owned by government. Where is the theory that explains this economy?" (Talks at Google. YouTube)

Andrew Lo
50. "From an ecological perspective, I know it's hard to not make value judgments but as a scientist what we might want to do is first study the ecosystem, measure all of the various different species and their biomasses and look at mating rituals and behaviors. And once you actually map out all of these relationships, you can then decide what you want to do with the information." (Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Light. YouTube)

H. Academic economics focuses too much on general theories

Adam Smith
51. "I have no great faith in political arithmetic and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations." (The Wealth of Nations)

Ludwig von Mises
52. "The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences." (Economists dissing economics. Unlearning Economics)

Friedrich Hayek
53. "How does economics really look like when you recognize it as the prototype of a new kind of science of complex phenomena which could not employ the simple model of mechanics or physics, but had to deal with what then I described as mere pattern predictions, certain limited prediction?" (Interview with Gary North and Mark Skousen in Hayek on Hayek)

David Glasner
54. "In economics the simple predictions that can be accurately made is almost nil because economics is inherently a theory of complex social phenomena and simplifying the real world problems to which we apply the theory to allow testable prediction to be made is extremely difficult and hardly ever possible." (What is so Great about Science? How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Metaphysics)

Dani Rodrik
55. "The diversity of models in economics is the necessary counterpart to the flexibility of the social world." (Economics Rules)

I. Academic economics uses esoteric language

John Maynard Keynes
56. "Too large a proportion of recent mathematical economics is mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols." (Economists dissing economics. Unlearning Economics)

Roger Backhouse, Bradley Bateman
57. "Government doesn't cut an abstract entity called 'government spending'. It cuts veterans benefits, homeland security and Medicare/Medicaid." (Wanted Worldly Philosophers. New York Times)

Alfred Marshall
58. "Great mischief seems to have been done by... drawing broad artificial lines of division where nature has made none." (Principles of Economics, 1890)

Peter Radford
59. "It is always tempted, therefore, to bang such problems into bizarre shapes in order to attempt to redefine them for analysis, hence the blind spots and contortions over the recent crisis and over inequality." (Why Mainstream Economic Models Make Little Sense)

Aaron Gordon
60. "Esoteric topics rules academia. These topics get researched, presented and published and somewhat tragically, immediately dispatched into the far reaches of the JSTOR achieves." (Killing Pigs and Weed Maps: The Mostly Unread World of Academic Papers)

J. Academic economics overrates mathematical models

Mark Blaug
61. "Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigor is everything and practical relevance is nothing." (Economists dissing economics. Unlearning Economics)

Tony Lawson
62. "In economics faculties, probably more than 90% of what is taught focuses or employs some form of mathematical reasoning." (Really Reorienting Modem Economics. YouTube)

Brad Voracek
63. "While today's experts hold prestigious positions, their understanding of math is often greater than their understanding of the economy. As the 2008 recession demonstrated, the majority of current experts didn't get things right." (Ending the Econocracy: The Need for Pluralism in Economics)

Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize 1976)
64. "Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems." (Economists dissing economics. Unlearning Economics)