I’m a biologist, but my college offered a few humanities courses, so I took an introductory course in economics.
The maths was fine; it was mostly linear equations and differentiation. But the priors seemed to defy all logic and common sense. It was like a physicist assuming that there was no friction. The impression I got was that economists put too much effort into mathematical rigour and too little into empirical verification.
Now there are biologists who study animal societies and their ‘economic systems’. But they care more for experiments than for theory, and this seems to me to be the more reasonable approach.
I’m a biologist, but my college offered a few humanities courses, so I took an introductory course in economics.
The maths was fine; it was mostly linear equations and differentiation. But the priors seemed to defy all logic and common sense. It was like a physicist assuming that there was no friction. The impression I got was that economists put too much effort into mathematical rigour and too little into empirical verification.
Now there are biologists who study animal societies and their ‘economic systems’. But they care more for experiments than for theory, and this seems to me to be the more reasonable approach.