I_Ryan
February 11, 2011, 12:58pm
2
xahrx:
I’ve been kicking an idea around after a prolonged argument with a friend about math in economics; why hasn’t anyone tried to invent a new type of math specifically designed around the idea of capturing the cause and effect and unidirection nature of time as seen by humans? In physics apparently the equations work no matter which way time runs, one of the reasons the equations aren’t applicable in economics is because even if you grant an entirely deterministic and predictable we just can’t get the information necessary to predict it on a practical level. So why not alter the math? Why not a new form of math in which all factors have a time index and causal component. Nothing with a time index of t could be said to affect or cause anything with a time index of <t, and then throw some ‘art’ in in terms of some kind of measure as to how much this affects that.
So say you take Total Savings (TS) as a metric. It gets a subscript ‘t’ and ‘c’. Technically people are as much a part of causing the metric as they are of reacting to it if they even do, but they can’t react to what they haven’t created yet, so a measure of TS at time t can’t affect behavior at any time index of >t, and the ‘c’ could include some guess as to how much TS reacts with or ‘causes’ other metrics in the market to shift. And, get rid of the equals sign. Replace it with an arrow; this leads to that.
This obviously isn’t science, but instead of dismissing math altogether why not try and mold it to something that actually reflects reality to a point? Hell, Austrians could pioneer this kind of thing perhaps. There’s already similar types of things done in areas like disease research where cause and effect are important to discern. Maybe someone has already tried this in economics, but I haven’t seen it. If any of you have, please point me to it.
About symbol logic, but probably similar enough.
I have always thought that it isn’t really mathematics in general that the Austrian School doesn’t approve of for economics, but a specific kind of mathematics (calculus or whatever they try to use). I mean, what’s mathematics but a “rigorous” language designed out of a spontaneous order to capture the information on a very low level of analysis? So in principle why wouldn’t it be useful to try to build one for economics?
(By the way, I have no idea what you were trying to do in your 2nd paragraph, so I’m just commenting on the general point.)