Reading this essay about how coincidences are not magical and signs from the universe reminded me of another story I had read a while back also involving truly large numbers, double jackpot winners and chances of sharing your birthday with another person at a party - this one was about astrology. Elsewhere economists have been compared to astrologers.
To a lay person it seems as if you can create a mathematical structure to explain observed phenomenon than you automatically start to resemble a science. But sometimes when you go a step further and start prognosticate what will happen in the future using that same structure - it puts you in the realm of economists and astrologers. Since there is some mathematical basis to begin, then they likely have a lingering claim to science as well.
..Ultimately, the problem isn’t with worshipping models of the stars, but rather with uncritical worship of the language used to model them, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in economics. The economist Paul Romer at New York University has recently begun calling attention to an issue he dubs ‘mathiness’ – first in the paper ‘Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth’ (2015) and then in a series of blog posts. Romer believes that macroeconomics, plagued by mathiness, is failing to progress as a true science should, and compares debates among economists to those between 16thcentury advocates of heliocentrism and geocentrism
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