[Note to Nick: This is Jakob, the economist, brother of your Tinbergen.] There are also a number of misunderstandings about mathematics. Sometimes it is believed that only certain very simple and therefore "rigid" relations are representative by mathematics and that reality is more flexible, or however it may be expressed. This is to underestimate the power of mathematics: more advanced mathematics is able to express also much more complicated and flexible relations and partly to handle them. On the other hand it is sometimes forgotten that arguments against the most general types of mathematics are just arguments against science in general, i.e., against the assumption that we can understand connections between phenomena - in this case economic phenomena - in some general way. If determinacy - in whatever loose form - is not accepted at all, there is no economics: no mathematical economics and no literary economics. Perhaps there would remain economic novels; personally I would prefer other novels then.
(from The Functions of Mathematical Treatment, J. Tinbergen, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Nov., 1954), pp. 365-369) ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
