Someone mentioned Brian Arthur and his part in Mitchell Waldrop's book
"Complexity". That book
had a fairly interesting and novel (novel to me anyway) critique of the
mathematical "culture" of
Economics. The critique originates from a group of physicists called to
the Santa Fe institute
to do their interdisciplinary thang in a seminar with a group of
economists. Both groups
introduced themselves via a tour of the mathematical models used in each
profession.
Waldrop recounts that the physicists were somewhat taken aback by the
economists. They
seemed quite technically proficient but the economist's use of models
seemed somewhat alien
to them. (If anyone else read this critique and understands it better
please contribute what you
remember of it.) What I remember about the critique is that physicists
seem to spend alot of effort trying to come up with models that fit
phenomenon as they observed them but
that the economists spent much more effort deriving their models from
first principles.
Another implication of this was that the physicists were much more
willing junk the models in
the face of new evidence.
If that is true, I wonder if a case could be made that this is approach
is much more prone
to ideological "contamination" than the sort of modeling physicists do
(the difference in subject
matter is relevant, of course).
Any thoughts???
-Paul Meyer
