AFTER MATHINESS

"These and many other mathematical statements don't remotely correspond to observable reality, nor do they have any evidence in support of them." -- Noah Smith,  How 'Mathiness' Made Me Jaded About Economics

Will anything change in the wake of the big mathiness dustup of 2015? Of course not. This is, after all, only a "technical discussion on cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz" not a searching inquiry into the identity and fundamental commitments of the economics political economy.

In his 1872 review of Thomas Brassey's Work and Wages, Frederic Harrison denounced political economy as a "magazine of untruth," specifying, "Political economy professes to be a science based on observation. But the bitter pedantry which often usurps that name usually assumes its facts, after it has rounded off dogmas to suit its clients."

Today's growth economics assumes the same facts and rounds off the same dogmas as did its magazine-of-untruth counterpart 143 years ago. Up until the 1870s, that dogma was called the wages-fund doctrine. Since the 1950s, it has borne the alias of economic growth. Same difference. The affiliated "fact" is that all blessings flow from the expansion of trade, therefore any impediment to that expansion is anathema.

The rest is rounding off.