“The temptation to use mathematics is irresistible for economists. It appears to convey the appropriate air of scientific authority and precision to economists' musings.”

— Paul Ormerod , book The Death of Economics

Part I, Chapter 3, The Roots of Economic Orthodoxy, p. 43
The Death of Economics (1994)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The temptation to use mathematics is irresistible for economists. It appears to convey the appropriate air of scientifi…" by Paul Ormerod?

Paul Ormerod 20

English economist

Related quotes

“Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.”

Thomas Piketty book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 32.

“The illiterate expression ‘given data’ constantly recurs in Lange. It appears to have an irresistable attraction to mathematical economists because it doubly assures them that they know what they do not know. It seems to bewitch them into making assertions about the real world for which they have no empirical justification whatever.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, "Two Pages of Fiction" (1982)

“The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Letter To Those In power, p. 83
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)

“A useful role exists for the economist is making calculations of the prospective costs and/or benefits of alternative policies. This role is precisely the one Keynes had in mind, I assume, when he expressed the hope that we would become useful after the fashion of dentists.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency." 1988

“If an economist uses a complicated model to predict just about anything, you can ignore it.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Press release, 10 September 2008 http://dilbert.com/blog
Context: If an economist uses a complicated model to predict just about anything, you can ignore it. By analogy, a doctor can’t tell you the exact date of your death in 50 years. But if a doctor tells you to eat less and exercise more, that’s good advice even if you later get hit by a bus. Along those same lines, economists can give useful general advice on the economy, even if you know there will be surprises. Still, be skeptical.

“It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: World Commodities and World Currencies (1944), Chapter X, Commodity Unit Stabilization, p. 109

“I do not overlook the important contributions to economic theory in the past whether orthodox or heterodox I correlate them with institutional economics. The classical and communistic economists used as their measure of value the man hour of labor. This is evidently since the incoming of scientific management the engineering economics of efficiency. The Austrian and hedonistic economists deriving from Bentham used as the measure of value the diminishing marginal utility of consumption goods. This is evidently the home economics recently introduced in the college curriculum.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: "Institutional economics," 1936, p. 242

“It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, “Economics is what economists do,” and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Economics As a Science, 1970, p. 97

“You have a voice, which has been perhaps been quiescent on matters economic because you have in the past deferred to the authority of the economist. There is no reason to remain quiet.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 14, There Are Alternatives, p. 313

“We economists love to quote Keynes’s final lines in his 1936 General Theory—for the reason that they cater so well to our vanity and self-importance. But to admit the truth, madmen in authority can self generate their own frenzies without needing help from either defunct or avant-garde economists. What establishment economists brew up is as often what the Prince and the Public are already wanting to imbibe. We guys don’t stay in the best club by proffering the views of some past academic crank or academic sage.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Coeditor's Forword in Inside the economist’s mind: conversations with eminent economists (2007)
New millennium

“The temptation to use mathematics is irresistible for economists. It appears to convey the appropriate air of scientific authority and precision to economists' musings.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Paul Ormerod 20

Related quotes

Related topics