I was rather surprised when I heard the professor say that much of the political science academia and many public policy thinkers have an extreme objection to “scientism” and have criticised technocrats who think their mathematical models reflect human behaviour.
I am amazed. Have economics and politics faculties switched sides? There would once have been a time when an economist would have said that human action can’t be quantified and reduced to sweeping mathematical models, while public policy thinkers thought they could solve any problem through systems analysis and report-gathering.
Now, it’s politics faculties who criticise extreme scientism and say that it has absolutely nothing to do with understanding human beings on a large scale, when humans behave no less uncertainly on a small scale or a large scale. Meanwhile, today’s economists show more and more faith in mathematical models and their supposedly precise statistical analysis.
For as long as politics will exist economics is just a tool. Thats why economics that uses statistics as its methodology is so useful to politicians and special interests - you can prove anything you want and get away with it as it is seen as SCIENCE!!11one! to the masses.
Wow, where do you go to school? Where I go, from what i understand, they are force feeding political scientists to use econometrics to model behaviour. Sigh…
“while public policy thinkers thought they could solve any problem through systems analysis and report-gathering.”
The more they analyze market “problems”, the bigger the government becomes (more staff, bigger budget, etc.), and that means they know less about government problems (real problems) because they have just created new problems (rent seeking, conflicts of interest, etc.).
To be fair, heavy scientism in understanding of social and human life is a bit of an Anglo-American thing. In continental Europe, they seem to raise their eyebrows at people who show pride in their mathematical models.
But for Chinese, Japanese, Indians,.etc people who can’t speak English properly like being given mathematical problems to solve. Subramaniam Swamy, an Indian economist, said that he was glad to be Paul Samuelson’s student in MIT - he disliked the “Shakespearean economics” of pre-1940s economists, and was glad Samuelson reduced economics to a language he could understand.
Hyperspecialized mathematical economics is a bit of Nutty Professor thing - you have a confused understanding of every basic thing in life except your narrow subject.