So I tell them a story about Sir W. Arthur Lewis. When I was a master's student myself at Princeton, I once attended a lecture that he gave on real wages, the commodity terms of trade, and North-South income differentials. The talk had no math in it. One of the younger faculty members of the economics department was sitting in the front row, and I could see him scratching his head in confusion throughout the talk. A few minutes after Sir Arthur was done, this young professor jumped up in excitement and went up to the board. "Now I get it!" he exclaimed and began to scribble some equations on the board. "This is the equation which relates to what you said in the first part of your talk, and this one expresses the other, and here is a third... and now finally we have three independent equations that determines your three endogenous variables..." Sir Arthur kept on his bemused smile as his lecture was explained to him in mathematical terms.
The moral of the story is that if you are smart enough to be a Nobel-prize winning economist maybe you can do without the math, but the rest of us mere mortals cannot. We need the math to make sure that we think straight--to ensure that our conclusions follow from our premises and that we haven't left loose ends hanging in our argument.
In other words, we use math not because we are smart, but because we are not smart enough.
We are just smart enough to recognize that we are not smart enough. And this recognition, I tell our students, will set them apart from a lot of people out there with very strong opinions about what to do about poverty and underdevelopment.
9 comentarios:
Está muy bueno el post, y me gusta mucho la anécdota. En mi caso, creo que le agrego una cuota más de placer por leer esto dado que el uso que le doy a la matemática es exactamente ése.
No obstante, parece oportuno admitir que existen muchas cabezas (a veces me incluyo) que empiezan a refunfuñar si no ven una ecuación en el medio de un argumento.
De hecho, Sam, la teoria general está escrita en prosa. Hay poquitas ecuaciones. Eso no quiere decir que por algún lado pueda hacer aguas, pero yo no me siento en condiciones de motrar eso...
Lo que está claro es que el modelo ISLM de hansen y el de Hicks, se quedaron cortos!
Excelente post, Sam!
Muy buena la anécdota!
Muy bueno, muy bueno
GRAN anécdota. Muy bueno Sam.
Será porque me cuesta creer en palabras, pero una ecuación es otra cosa.
Muy buena la anécdota.
Me gustó la cita, sobre todo el último párrafo.
Tengo la impresión que es un factor determinante de la forma de pensar de mucha gente. Una persona con alguna formación rigurosa sabe que las "verdades científicas" son necesariamente provisorias (por algo las llaman teorías) pero al mismo tiempo sabe que eso no las invalida y menos todavía invalida la metodología. Este punto es lo que permite progresar en el conocimiento. .
Para mi hay (por lo menos) dos posturas inmovilizantes: que la realidad es incognoscible y la otra es el determinismo (en todas sus variantes).
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