In this interesting article published in Economia (a trade journal for Chartered Accountants), we find a left-progressive argument against math and its overly prominent role in neoclassical economics:
This discontent was born in the post-autistic economics movement, which started in Paris in 2000, and spread to the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Its adherents’ main complaint was that the mainstream economics taught to students had become a branch of mathematics, disconnected from reality.
The revolt made little progress in the years of the Great Moderation of the 2000s, but was revived following the 2008 crisis. Two important links with the earlier network are US economist James Galbraith, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, and British economist Ha-Joon Chang, author of the best-selling 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism.
In a manifesto published in April, economics students at the University of Manchester advocated an approach “that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it,” rather than with mathematical models based on unreal assumptions. Significantly, Andrew Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, wrote the introduction.
The Manchester students argue that “the mainstream within the discipline (neoclassical theory) has excluded all dissenting opinion, and the crisis is arguably the ultimate price of this exclusion. Alternative approaches such as post-Keynesian, Marxist, and Austrian economics (as well as many others) have been marginalised. The same can be said of the history of the discipline.” As a result, students have little awareness of neoclassical theory’s limits, much less alternatives to it.
