Prosigamos sin más dilación. Ver primera parte. Me limitaré a pegar algunos párrafos que considero relevantes en este debate.

Peter Klein en su blog se pregunta lo siguiente:

How much has formal, mathematical economic theory contributed to our understanding of the world? What economic phenomena do we understand better today than we did, say, before World War II, when the principal language of English-speaking economists was, well, English?

What about organization theory, sociology, law, political science? Has the formalist revolution generated new and valuable insights, or merely restated existing truths in new language (possibly mangling them in the process)?

A esto creo que un economista neoclásico convencido de la bondad del uso de las matemáticas respondería, con algo de este estilo (comentario surgido aquí):

los economistas hemos hecho un gran trabajo estudiando los fallos del gobierno y de la política en general como institución asignadora de recursos desde los años 70 revelando sus deficiencias en términos comparables con los fallos del mercado. Primero fué la escuela de la “Elección Pública” (Downs, Black, Buchanan, Olson, Niskanen, Mueller, etc.) seguida por la “Elección Social” (Arrow, Sen, Hurwicz, Gibbard, Maskin, etc.) y su heredera la nueva “Economía Política” actual que ha crecido muchísimo y ha revelado innumerables fallos del gobierno, de la democracia, la burocracia, teoría de la corrupción política, etc.

Desde hace ya una década se estudia cada vez más con experimentos de teoría de juegos la provisión privada de bienes públicos con resultados muy esperanzadores.

De hecho, estamos ya en situación de hablar de una teoría institucional de la asignación de recursos que hace comparables los posibles fallos de cada institución. Nada de esto existiría sin el esfuerzo de la economía matemática, que revela con exactitud la naturaleza de los fallos y las posibilidades de solucionarlos.

Un párrafo de Nassim Taleb, encontrado por aquí que tampoco tiene desperdicio. Taleb es una de esas personas cuyo mayor hobbie, como dice en su web, es teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know.….

What has gone with the development of economics as a science? Answer: There was a bunch of intelligent people who felt compelled to use mathematics just to tell themselves that they were rigorous in their thinking, that theirs was a science. Someone in a great rush decided to introduce mathematical modeling techniques (culprits: Leon Walras, Gerard Debreu, Paul Samuelson) without considering the fact that either the class of mathematics they were using was too restrictive for the class of problems they were dealing with, or that perhaps they should be aware that the precision of the language of mathematics could lead people to believe that they had solutions when in fact they had none. . . . Indeed the mathematics they dealt with did not work in the real world, possibly because we needed richer classes of processes — and they refused to accept the fact that no mathematics at all was probably better. (Fooled by Randomness, p. 177)

Tampoco él es un ignorante de las herramientas matemáticas, ni mucho menos… ver su perfil en Wikipedia.

A continuación Antal Fekete, matemático de formación y experto en temas monetarios. Cuenta un encuentro que tuvo con Paul Volcker:

Paul (Volcker) of course knew that I was a professional mathematician. He asked me if I would be interested in setting up a differential equation to describe the relationship between the foreign exchange rate and the spread between the rates of interest prevailing in the two countries. I guess if I had said “yes”, then I could have made a career as a contributor of dismal monetary science, with a fat research grant from the FR bank of New York. But I said “no” adding that, in my opinion, there was no such a thing. Differential equations describe the relationship of causality. They are quite useless if what you want to grasp is the relationship of teleology. And the relationship between foreign exchange rates and interest-rate spreads was a problem of teleology, not one of causality. You can’t treat individuals who have free will as if they were inanimate particles in a physical experiment. That’s the trouble with macroeconomics as opposed to microeconomics. It assumes that economic aggregates have their own lives, and in their hands individuals are lifeless, inert matter that, like playdough, could be given any desired shape.

Pero, ¿no sufre la micro neoclásica también de esos problemas que denuncia Fekete para la macro, de la falta de consideracción de la libre voluntad del ser humano?

Por último, un extracto sublime de LUDWIG LACHMANN en CAPITAL AND ITS STRUCTURE (.pdf) rechazando el uso de formalización matemática (ecuaciones diferenciales) para su análisis de procesos en relación con la teoría del capital y su noción de estructura del capital (heterogénea y existiendo complementariedad) en presencia de unexpected change. Tomo las citas de aquí:

I. 40

In this book we shall thus employ the method of process analysis based on plans and those entrepreneurial decisions which accompany their success and failure. But we shall not indulge in building ‘dynamic models’ based on ‘behaviour functions’ expressed in terms of ‘difference equations’. Our reason for this refusal is that to assume that entrepreneurial conduct in revising plans at the end of successive periods is, in any objective sense, determined by past experience and thus predictable, would mean falling into a rigid determinism which is quite contrary to everyday experience. (nótese su enfoque metodológico implícitamente aquí. No se basa en criterios praxeológicos, sino de la experiencia diaria)

I.41

Men in society come to learn about each other’s needs and resources and modify their conduct in accordance with such knowledge. But the acquisition of this knowledge follows no definite pattern, certainly no time-pattern. Knowledge is not acquired merely as time goes by.

I.42

All human conduct is, of course, moulded by experience, but there is a subjective element in the interpretation of experience to ignore which would be a retrograde step. Different men react to the same experience in different ways. Were we concerned with ‘Macro-dynamics’ all this might not matter very much. Probability might provide a convenient way out. But we are concerned with the conduct of the individual entrepreneur. A rigid determinism in these matters would appear to reflect an outmoded, pre-Knightian approach. The econometricians have thus far failed to explain why in an uncertain world the meaning of past events should be the only certain thing, and why its ‘correct’ interpretation by entrepreneurs can always be taken for granted.

I.43

To assume ‘given behaviour functions’ or ‘entrepreneurial reaction equations’ is simply to deny that entrepreneurs are capable of interpreting historical experience, i.e. experience which does not repeat itself. In other words, to make these assumptions is to say that entrepreneurs are automata and have no minds. Observation, however, bears out the contention that entrepreneurial minds exist and function. (nótese nuevamente su enfoque metodológico implícitamente aquí. No se basa en criterios praxeológicos, sino de la experiencia diaria)

I.44

The entrepreneurial interpretation of past experience finds its most interesting manifestation in the formation of expectations. Expectations, i.e. those acts of the entrepreneurial mind which constitute his ‘world’, diagnose ‘the situation’ in which action has to be taken, and logically precede the making of plans, are of crucial importance for process analysis. A method of dynamic analysis which fails to allow for variable expectations due to subjective interpretation seems bound to degenerate into a series of economically irrelevant mathematical exercises.

I.45

It thus seems clear that a study of capital problems in a world of unexpected change has to be conducted by means of process analysis, and that the application of this method presupposes a study of entrepreneurial expectations.

Esta reflexión tiene bastante que ver con una de las divagaciones de un post anterior.