Fundamentals of fiscal policy

This post is a list of quotes outlining my beliefs about fiscal policy. There are 29 quotes divided into 7 sections:

A. Government finance should be audited to ensure money is spent efficiently (3)
B. We should invest in building a strong middle class (5)
C. We should support our most vulnerable citizens (4)
D. Single-payer healthcare is the best healthcare solution (5)
E. We should accelerate innovation in critical technologies (4)
F. Foreign aid is an effective foreign policy (5)
G. Raising taxes on rich individuals will not significantly hurt economic growth (3)

A. Government finance should be audited to ensure money is spent efficiently

Henry George (1839-1897, economist)
1. "To prevent government from being corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible... and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people as directly within their control as may be." (Social Problems, 1883)

Louis Brandeis (1856-1941, lawyer)
2. "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial disease. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." (Other People's Money - And How Bankers Use It, 1914)

James Madison (1751-1836, 4th President of the United States)

3. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." (Federalist No. 51, 1788)

B. We should invest in building a strong middle class

Barack Obama (1961-now, 44th President of the United States):
4. "We don't just want everyone to share in America's success, we want everyone to contribute to our success." (State of the Union Address, 2015)

Barack Obama (1961-now, 44th President of the United States):
5. "In a global economy, a country's greatest resource is its people. So by investing in you, this nation can open the door for far more prosperity - because unlocking a nation's potential depends on empowering all its people, especially it's young people." (Yangon University Speech, 2012)

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
6. "According to a 2007 report by the Federal Revere Bank of Minneapolis, 'The most efficient means to boost the productivity of the workforce 15 to 20 years down the road is to invest in today's youngest children.'" (Our Revolution, 2016)

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
7. "Today in America, hundreds of thousands of bright young people who have the desire and the ability to get a college education will not be able to do so because their families lack the money." (Our Revolution, 2016)

Arthur MacEwan (1942-now, economist):
8. "It's not hard to figure out what kinds of jobs should be created with government stimulus spending. Prime examples include environmental repair and preservation, education and training and infrastructure repair and extension." (What Would Full Employment Cost? 2015)

C. We should support our most vulnerable citizens

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
9. "[A nation] is judged by how well it treats its weakest a most vulnerable citizens. A truly great nation is one that is filled with compassion and solidarity." (Our Revolution, 2016)

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
10. "When people become old, they often become frail and sick. They are unable to work and earn an income. In a civilized society, the older generation - the people who raised us - are entitled, and allowed, to live out their remaining years in dignity and security." (Our Revolution, 2016)

Hillary Clinton (1947-now, politician):
11. "Look at the budget that was just proposed in Washington. It is an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us, the youngest, the oldest, the poorest, and hard working people who need a little help to gain or hang on to a decent middle class life." (Wellesley commencement speech, 2017)

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
12. "Study after study has shown that without stable housing it is much harder for working people to hold down jobs and get the health care they need, and children are put at a profound disadvantage in terms of intellectual and emotional development and school performance... Decent-quality affordable housing should be a right of all Americans." (Our Revolution, 2016)

D. Single-payer healthcare is the best healthcare solution

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
13. "The United States must join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to every man, woman and child through a Medicare for all single-payer system." (Our Revolution, 2016)

American Medical Student Association:
14. "If Americans believe in an inalienable right to life, how can we tolerate a system that denies people lifesaving medications and treatments?" (The Case for Universal Healthcare, 2009)

Commonwealth Fund:
15. "Despite having the most expensive health care system, the United States ranks last overall among 11 industrialized countries on measures of health system quality, efficiency, access to care, equity, and healthy lives...'" (US Health System Ranks Last Among Eleven Countries, 2014)

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
16. "The United States has thousands of different health insurance plans, all of which set different reimbursement rates across different networks for providers and procedures. This results in extremely high administrative costs." (Our Revolution, 2016)

Robert Frank (journalist):
17. "The most important source of cost savings under single-payer is that large government entities are able to negotiate much more favorable terms with service providers." (Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money, 2017)

E. We should accelerate innovation in critical technologies

Bernie Sanders (1941-now, politician):
18. "This is the stuff we do so well when challenged as a nation, whether by putting a man on the moon, eradicating diseases, or developing the Internet. The U.S. can and must dedicate our engineering know-how to a clean energy revolution, in our universities, in our national energy labs, and in businesses and communities all across the country." (Our Revolution, 2016)

Bill Gates (1955-now, businessman):
19. "The only reason I'm optimistic about [renewable energy] is because of innovation... I want to tilt the odds in our favor by driving innovation at an unnaturally high pace, or more than its current business-as-usual course." (We Need an Energy Miracle, 2015)

Bill Nye (1955-now, science communicator):
20. "Desalination of water could be the key to the future for so may of us humans... We could have all the clean water we wanted for everybody all over the world and we would power pumps with solar power..." (Big Think: Can We Desalinate Water for Human Consumption on a Massive Scale? 2016)

Annie Sneed (journalist):
21. "To limit warming, nations will also likely need to physically remove carbon from the atmosphere. And to do that, they will have to deploy 'negative emissions technology' - technologies that scrub CO2 out of the air." (The Search Is on for Pulling Carbon from the Air, 2016)

F. Foreign aid is an effective foreign policy

Tessie San Martin (nonprofit executive):
22. "Without reliable data we have no way of understanding the magnitude of a problem or evaluating whether and how our programming is helping to address it." (Amen to accountability in foreign aid, 2017)

Mala Yousafzai (1997-now, activist):
23. "Why is it that countries which we call 'strong' are so powerful in creating wars but are so weak in bringing peace? Why is it that giving guns is so easy but giving books is so hard? Why is it that making tanks is so easy, but building schools is so hard?" (Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 2014)

Max Friedman (historian):
24. "Exclusion from economic gains, making individuals believe that elites are not sharing revenue, may also be another significant factor driving extremism." (Why Current Foreign Aid Benefits Terrorists, 2017)

Kofi Annan (1938-now, 7th Secretary-General for the United Nations):
25. "The international community... allows nearly 3 billion people - almost half of all humanity - to subsist on $2 or less a day in a world of unprecedented wealth." (Can Globalization Really Solve Our Problems? 2002)

Jimmy Carter (1924-now, 39th President of the United States):
26. "Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood." (Remarks on the 30th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1978)

G. Raising taxes on rich individuals will not significantly hurt economic growth

Thomas Hungerford (economist)
27. "The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth [in the United States]. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie." (Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945, 2012)

Alana Semuels (journalist):
28. "[In the United States] between 1935 and 1982, the top tax rate did not dip below 70 percent. Part of this was due to a belief among those in charge that government had a role in combating extreme wealth." (Is the U.S. Due for Radically Raising Taxes for the Rich? 2016)

Thomas Hungerford (economist)
29. "The top marginal rate in the 1950s was over 90 percent and the real GDP growth rate averaged 4.2 percent and the real per capita GDP increased annually by 2.4 percent in the 1950s." (Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945, 2012)

What is science?

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What is science? I have two definitions:

1. Science is a method of establishing knowledge through controlled experiments

2. Science is the study of any subject related to physics, chemistry or biology

Below is an explanation of each definition.

1. Science is a method of establishing knowledge through controlled experiments

According to the first definition, there is not a strict boundary between science and non-science because we can never be sure that every confounding variable has been controlled in an experiment. There is always a chance that an unseen variable could affect the experiment. In this regard, science is a subjective concept.

Is economics a science? I believe it depends on the specific study. I think the closest thing we have to controlled experiments in economics are quasi-experimental analyses which look at real world events that resemble controlled experiments. The problem with these studies is that there can be many confounding variables. For this reason, I believe it depends on each specific study for whether or not we can call it science.

2. Science is the study of any subject related to physics, chemistry or biology

The second definition of science has to do with physics, chemistry and biology. If you are studying a subject that involves any of these topics, I believe you are studying science. This definition also corresponds to science education in K-12 schools.

The rest of this post is a list of definitions of science from other philosophers.

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 natural phenomena and of the relations between them." (Wikipedia: Demarcation problem, 10.4.22 UTC 05:50)

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: Demarcation problem, 10.4.22 UTC 05:50)

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: Demarcation problem, 10.4.22 UTC 05:50)

Fundamentals of reason

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Photo license: CC BY 2.0

This post is a collection of quotes about reason. There are 14 quotes divided into 5 sections:

A. Reasons fit together to support or deny a proposition (2)
B. Sensory experience is the source of all evidence (2)
C. It's impossible to 100% prove or disprove a proposition (except for a few absolute facts) (2)
D. Controlled experiments are a good source of evidence (4)
E. Disagreements are impossible to resolve when people are not clear about the reasons and evidence they are using (4)

A. Reasons fit together to support or deny a proposition

Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher):
1. "Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems." (Discourse on Method, 1637)

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970, philosopher):
2. "Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of statements." (The Unity of Science, 1934)

B. Sensory experience is the source of all evidence

David Hume (1711-1776, philosopher):
3. "I never can catch myself at anytime without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception." (A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739)

John Locke (1632-1704, philosopher)
4. "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689)

C. It's impossible to 100% prove or disprove a proposition (except for a few absolute facts)

Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher):
5. "In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things." (Principles of Philosophy, 1644)

Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794, chemist):
6. "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)

D. Controlled experiments are a good source of evidence

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970, philosopher):
7. "One of the principal tasks of the logical analysis of a given proposition is to find out the method of verification for that proposition." (Philosophy and Logical Syntax, 1935)

Roger Bacon (1219-1292, philosopher):
8. "Experimental science is the queen of sciences, and the goal of all speculation." (Quoted in Science at the Medieval Universities by James Walsch)

Richard Feynman (1918-1988, physicist):
9. "...if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid." (Adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address)

Claude Bernard (1813-1878, physiologist):
10. "Indeed, proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be still established that when this condition is removed the phenomenon will no longer appear." (Introduction a l'Etude de la Medecine Experimental, 1865)

E. Disagreements are impossible to resolve when people are not clear about the reasons they are using

Francis Bacon (1561-1626, philosopher):
11. "Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion." (Novum Organum, 1620)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
12. "To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." (Philosophical Occasions, 1993 posthumous)

I. A. Richards (1893-1979, literary critic):
13. "Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies." (Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1964)

Jane Goodall (1934-now, primatologist):
14. "Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries." (Quoted in Verge Magazine, 2010)

What is art?

What is art? Here is my definition:

Art is an expression of imagination and/or ability

I believe that not all expressions are art. For example, if you ask for a glass of water, you are making an expression, but not creating art. Another example, if you say that the sky is blue, you are expressing something about the world, but that statement is also not art.

For an expression to become art, I believe it needs to either draw upon imagination and/or ability. Imagination is where our most creative thoughts exist, and whenever a person expresses these thoughts, I believe they are creating art. Also when a person demonstrates a talent or ability, I believe that is also art. In this regard, I believe that imagination and ability are two main sources for artistic inspiration.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Fundamentals of language

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Arto Alanepass (Aadesig)

Photo license: CC BY-SA 4.0

This post is a collection of quotes about language. There are 16 quotes divided into 5 sections:

A. Every word corresponds to a concept (or multiple concepts) (3)
B. Language is almost always subjective to a degree (2)
C. Grammar enables multiple words to express a more complex meaning (3)
D. Ideas come long before the proper words to describe them (4)
E. Language is central to every branch of knowledge (4)

A. Every word corresponds to a concept (or multiple concepts)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
1. "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of imagination." (Philosophical Investigations, posthumous 1963)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist):
2. "Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer and to rules by which they are assigned to these objects." (Ernst Mach Memorial Notice, 1916)

Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941, linguist):
3. "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way." (Language, Thought and Reality, 1956)

B. Language is almost always subjective to a degree

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
4. "For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules; it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules either." (The Blue Book, posthumous)

John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960, philosopher):
5. "Faced with the nonsense question, 'what is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up." (Philosophical Papers, 1979)

C. Grammar enables multiple words to express a more complex meaning

Stanley Fish (1938-now, literary critic):
6. "Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items pointing everywhere and nowhere." (How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, 2011)

William Cobbet (1763-1835, journalist):
7. "Grammar, perfectly understood enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express." (A Grammar of the English Language, 1818)

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970, philosopher):
8. "By the logical syntax of language, we mean the formal theory of the linguistic forms of that language - the systematic statement of the formal rules which govern it together with the development of the consequences which follow from these rules." (Logical Syntax of Language, 1934)

D. Ideas come long before the proper words to express them

Marianne Moore (1887-1972, poet):
9. "I've always felt that if a thing had been said the best way, how can you say it better?" (Paris Review Interview, 1960)

Sallie McFague (1933-now, theologian):
10. "A metaphor is a word used in an unfamiliar context to give us a new insight; a good metaphor moves us to see our world in an extraordinary way." (Speaking in Parables, 1975)

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992, actress):
11. "I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself." (Quoted in Presidential Wit and Wisdom by Brallier and Chabert)

John Searle (1932-now, philosopher):
12. "You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly." (The Storm Over the University, 1990)

E. Language is central to every branch of knowledge

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher):
13. "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)

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002, biologist):
14. "The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness." (The Flamingo's Smile, 1985)

Rachel Carson (1907-1964, biologist):
15. "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)

Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965, lawyer):
16. "All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material of which laws are made, out of which the constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them." (Quoted in Readers' Digest, 1964)

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)

Dani Rodrik and pluralism

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Andrej Barabasz (Chepry)

Photo license: CC BY-SA 3.0

About a month ago, I read the book Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik. I believe that the central message of the book is that economists should embrace a large tool kit of economic models. He also emphasizes the importance of being able to select the right model depending on the specific economic situation. Rodrik also has some interesting things to say about mathematical economics and critics of the economics profession.

This post is some of my favorite quotes from the book. I received permission in an email from Rodrik to create this post.

Support for pluralism

"Rather than a single, specific model, economics encompasses a collection of models. The discipline advances by expanding its library of models and by improving the mapping between these models and the real world. The diversity of models in economics is the necessary counterpart to the flexibility of the social world." (page 5)

"In part because economists take the natural sciences as their example, they have a tendency to misuse their models. They are prone to mistake a model for the model, relevant and applicable under all circumstances." (page 5)

"Knowledge accumulates in economics not vertically, with better models replacing worse ones, but horizontally with newer models explaining aspects of social outcomes that were unaddressed earlier." (page 67)

"In the end, it was clear that no single theory could fully explain the story of the U.S. inequality since the 1970's. Nor was there a good way of parsing the relative contributions of different theories. Certain theories (models) gave us a better understanding of the channels through which trade, technology and other factors may have operated. The failure of other theories allowed us to rule out mechanisms that appeared equally plausible at the outset. There was no closure, but there was plenty of learning along the way." (page 143)

"Today it is almost a mantra for development economists, finance experts, and international agencies that no single set of policies is appropriate for all countries that domestic reforms must be tailored to specific circumstances." (page 167)

How to choose the right model

"[A model's] conclusions are true only to the extent that their critical assumptions approximate reality. When they don't, we need to rely on models with different assumptions." (page 18)

"As Stanford economist Paul Pfleiderer explains we always need to apply a 'realism filter' to critical assumptions before a model can be treated as useful." (page 26)

"Economic models are cases that come with explicit user's guides (teaching notes on how to apply them). That's because they are transparent about their critical assumptions and behavioral mechanisms." (page 73)

"Freshly minted PhD's come out of graduate school with a large inventory of models but virtually no formal training (no course work, no assignments, no problem sets) in how to choose among them." (page 84)

"Eventually, we developed a decision tree that helped us navigate across potential models... We would start at the top of the tree by asking whether the constraints on investment were mainly on the supply side or on the demand side... At each node of the decision tree, we tried to develop informal empirical tests to help us select among models that would send us down different paths." (page 89)

Support for simple models

"In truth, simple models of the type that economists construct are absolutely essential to understanding the workings of society. Their simplicity, formalism, and neglect of many facets of the real world are precisely what make them valuable." (page 11)

"What are economic models? The easiest way to understand them is as simplifications designed to show how specific mechanisms work by isolating them from other, confounding effects." (page 12)

Support for mathematical economics

"Math ensured that the elements of a model (the assumptions, behavioral mechanism and main results) are clearly stated and are transparent. Once a model is stated in mathematical form, what it says or does is obvious to all who can read it." (page 31)

"[Math] ensures the internal consistency of a model (simply put, that the conclusions follow from the assumptions). (page 32)

"Verbal arguments that seem intuitive often collapse or are revealed to be incomplete under closer mathematical scrutiny. The reason is that 'verbal models' can ignore nonobvious but potentially significant interactions." (page 34)

Critique of mathematical economics

"Math plays a purely instrumental role in economic models. In principle, models do not require math, and it is not the math that makes the models useful or scientific." (page 33)

"Too many economists fall in love with the math and forget its instrumental nature. Excessive formalization (math for it's own sake) is rampant in the discipline." (page 35)

"The profession's stars and most heavily cited economists are those who have shed light on important public problems... not its mathematical wizards." (page 37)

"Efforts to construct large-scale economic models have been singularly unproductive to date. To put it even more strongly, I cannot think of an important economic insight that has come out of such models." (page 39)

Analysis of the 2008 financial crisis

"That economists were mostly blind-sided by the crisis is undeniable. Many interpreted this as evidence of a fundamental breakdown in economics... But what makes this episode particularly curious is that there were, in fact, plenty of models to help explain what had been going on under the economy's hood. Bubbles (steady increases in asset prices divorced from their underlying value) are not a new phenomenon." (page 154)

"Models of self-fulfilling panic (a coordination failure in which individually rational withdrawals of credit lines produce collective irrationality in the form of a systemic drying up of liquidity) were well know to every student of economics." (page 155)

"A key pattern in the run up to the crisis was excessive risk taking by managers of financial institutions. Their compensation depended on it, but their behavior was not consistent with the interests of the banks' shareholders. This divergence between the interests of managers and shareholders is a centerpiece of principal-agent models." (page 155)

"In sum, economists became overconfident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation improves the risk-return trade-off, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot about the other models." (page 159)

What are the critics saying?

"I felt that many of the criticisms coming from outside the field missed the point. There was too much misinformation about what economists really do." (page xiii)

"Many of the complaints are well known: economics is simplistic and insular; it makes universal claims that ignore the role of culture, history and other background conditions; it reifies the market; it is full of implicit value judgments; and besides, it fails to explain and predict the developments in the economy. Each of these criticisms derives in large part from a a failure to recognize that economics is, in fact a collection of diverse models that do not have a particular ideological bent..." (page 6)

"One of the most frequent complaints about economics labels it a club that shuns outsiders. This exclusiveness makes the discipline insular, according to the critics, can be closed to new and alternative perspectives on economics. Economics should become more inclusive, they argue, more pluralistic and more welcoming of unorthodox approaches." (page 196)

"Pluralism with respect to conclusions is one thing; pluralism with respect to methods something else. No academic discipline is permissive of approaches that diverge too much from prevailing practices, and economics is unforgiving of those who violate the way work in the discipline is done. An aspiring economist has to formulate clear models and apply appropriate statistical techniques." (page 199)

"For some, these constraints represent a kind of methodological straitjacket that crowds out new thinking But it is easy to exaggerate the rigidity of the rules within which the profession operates." (page 200)

Chess metaphor for macroeconomics

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, MichaelMaggs

Photo license: CC BY-SA 3.0

I think of macroeconomics as being like a chess game. Similar to chess, the world economy is made of many different economic actors with different abilities and placements. The world economy has a structure that is continually evolving. Instead of relying on a particular macroeconomic theory, I think it's more effective to pragmatically analyze the structure of economic actors in an economy to determine the best course of action. In chess, players must also pragmatically analyze the structure of the pieces to make decisions.

Here is what each chess piece represents in the economy:

• Pawns: non-wealthy individuals
• Queen: billionaires
• Rooks, bishops and knights: companies
• King: planet earth
• Opponent's pieces: goods and services

Pawns represents non-wealthy individuals because pawns have the least mobility and are the weakest pieces on the board. If a pawn is able to reach the other side of the board, they acquire the abilities of a queen. This represents when a non-wealthy individual through hard work and luck is able to become a billionaire.

The queen represents billionaires because the queen has the greatest mobility and power in the game. Billionaires are the most powerful actors in the economy.

Rooks, bishops and knights represent companies because they have a lot of power but not as much as the queen. Companies are extremely diverse, therefore it's fitting that they can be either a rook, bishop or knight.

The king represents planet earth because if the king dies, the game is over. If planet earth becomes so polluted that it's uninhabitable, it's game over for society. A defensive strategy to protect the king is symbolic of regulations to protect the environment.

The opponent's pieces represent goods and services because the goal of economics is to produce goods and services. The goal of chess is to conquer the opponent's pieces.

When playing chess, it's important that all of your pieces work together. It's important that your pieces back each other up. Unsupported pawns stand no chance of surviving. Pawns need the help of more powerful pieces to make a greater contribution. Bottom line, your pieces must act like a team. Imagine playing a game of chess without moving your queen; you will lose. This is the similar to not taxing billionaires to pay for things that will improve society.

Here's a quote from Adam Smith referring to chess,

...in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759)

I have one last thing I want to say about metaphors. Metaphors are not supposed to be perfect equivalencies. I'm aware this metaphor has flaws if you expect chess to be a perfect representation of an economy. All metaphors break down at a certain point with enough scrutiny. This post is merely a list of connections that I think make sense.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0