[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)
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