Related papers: Economics cannot isolate itself from political the…
This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject "Can Economics Be a Physical Science?" The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the author…
Accuracy of economic theories and efficiency of economic policy strictly depend on the choice of the economic variables and processes mostly liable for description of economic reality. That states the general problem of assessment of any…
We extend Langdon Winner's idea that artifacts have politics into the realm of mathematics. To do so, we first provide a list of examples showing the existence of mathematical artifacts that have politics. In the second step, we provide an…
How can econophysics contribute to economics? Since the relation between basic principles of physics and economics is not established, there is no reason why physical theories should be of any value for economic theory. While economic…
In response to public scrutiny of data-driven algorithms, the field of data science has adopted ethics training and principles. Although ethics can help data scientists reflect on certain normative aspects of their work, such efforts are…
This essay considers the special character of mathematical reasoning, and draws on observations from interactive theorem proving and the history of mathematics to clarify the nature of formal and informal mathematical language. It proposes…
Many economic theory models incorporate finiteness assumptions that, while introduced for simplicity, play a real role in the analysis. We provide a principled framework for scaling results from such models by removing these finiteness…
Standard economic theory uses mathematics as its main means of understanding, and this brings clarity of reasoning and logical power. But there is a drawback: algebraic mathematics restricts economic modeling to what can be expressed only…
The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this…
Economies are fundamentally complex and becoming more so, but the new discipline of data science-which combines programming, statistics, and domain knowledge-can help cut through that complexity, potentially with productivity benefits to…
Mathematics cannot anymore be assimilated to a linguistic game, where formal proofs are strongly differentiated with conjectural thinking, without building any category of knowledge to understand the passage (Wittgenstein's gist). Nowadays,…
I argue that the current financial crisis highlights the crucial need of a change of mindset in economics and financial engineering, that should move away from dogmatic axioms and focus more on data, orders of magnitudes, and plausible,…
As David Berlinski writes (1997), the existence and nature of mathematics is a more compelling and far deeper problem than any of the problems raised by mathematics itself. Here we analyze the essence of mathematics making the main emphasis…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
The purpose of this essay is to bring out the unique role of Mathematics in providing a base to the diverse sciences which conform to its rigid structure. Of these the physical and economic sciences are so intimately linked with…
Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
We provide a formal framework accounting for a widespread idea in the theory of economic design: analytically established incompatibilities between given axioms should be qualified by the likelihood of their violation. We define the degree…
This paper proposes a framework for categorizing economic policies in a form of a tree taxonomy. The purpose of this approach is to construct an exhaustive and standardized list of actions that a governing authority has access to and can…
The state of economic theory and accumulated facts from the different branches of the economic science require to analyze the concept of the description of economy systems. The economic reality generates the problems the solution of that is…