Facts of life Quote by Frank H. Knight

“Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of…

— Thomas Piketty

The temptation to use mathematics is irresistible for economists. It appears to convey the appropriate air of scientific authority and precision to economists' musings.

— Paul Ormerod

In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science…

— William Stanley Jevons

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author…

— John Maynard Keynes

For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an…

— Thomas Piketty

“And it is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.”

— Mark Haddon

“To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often…

— Thomas Piketty

In the 1940s, economics started getting highly mathematical. It was basically because economists weren't smart enough to write down models of real behavior that…

— Richard Thaler

As there are so many who talk prose without knowing it, or, again, who syllogize without having the least idea what a syllogism is,…

— William Stanley Jevons

“For far too long, economists have neglected the distribution of wealth, partly because of Kuznets’s optimistic conclusions and partly because of the profession’s undue…

— Thomas Piketty

We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for…

— Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

“I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.”

— Cory Doctorow