Neo-classicists and the Neocons are not Economists but Phsyicist and Mathematicians Lost in the Maze of the Real Economy

I am an economist and a mathematician turned business studies lecturer because my subject was invaded by failed physicists and mathematicians who new and understood nothing about the economy, economics or its traditions. For a well crafted detailed indictment of what they have done and why they were always wrong and why they have all failed now read Mirkowski's "More Heat than Light".

All these so called economist from Debreu on, Nobel for his 'The Theory of Value', knew nothing whatsoever about the economy or economics. Debreu himself said on many occasions that he was not an economist. His Nobel prize winning work is a well crafted piece of differential topology, an existence theorem, to prove a solution exists to Walras' hypothesis, of a hundred years previously that prices could adjust by a process of trial and error, 'tattonement', to converge to a General Equilibrium - a set of prices such that that all markets cleared, i.e. supply equaled demand in every market.

His work is a beautiful demonstration of the wrongness not the rightness of General Equilibrium Theory and the Neo-Classical Economics that has now so catastrophically failed us. It is in fact a proof of what utter nonsense this perspective is. He shows that for General Equilibrium to be possible. There needs to be a set of markets defined over a complete, differentiable measure space defined over all time from the day of Genesis, the Big Bang, to the Present for all goods each of which must exist at all points of continuous time and between all points of time for this result to hold. His mathematics is beautiful but what arrant nonsense as economics.

For General Equilibrium to Exist even as an aspiration the universe has to be in stasis for eternity. Beautiful math that proves that economics based on the idea of tattonement leading in the limit to General Equilibrium is complete and utter nonsense. Instead his success with his Nobel acclamation charted a route that other followed in the Journal of Economic Theory, etc.

Marshal, the First Professor of Economics at Cambridge and Lord Keynes a successor were both excellent mathematicians, Keynes wrote a well respected treatise on probability theory but math never ever appeared in their published works in economics although it is clear they used it to discipline their thinking about the real economy, that especially Keynes practically knew so well. Keynes became very rich as did his College from his understanding of the stock market. Note that David Ricardo the second great economist, after Adam Smith, became very rich too from playing the markets in the early 19th Century - his father threw him out at 26 because he married a gentile. He retired to write around ten years later on what he made trading bonds on the London market.

Keynes summed it up in his General Theory to paraphrase "it is impossible to keep all necessary partial differentials you are holding constant at the back of your head when solving an economics problem" The relatively stable environment it is possible to create in physics both as a thought experiment and in the laboratory is simply non-existent in economics. Politics, society, human psychology and the natural environment co-evolve in a complex way with economic change such that it is impossible to truly keep track of where we are using mathematical formalism. The tradition of economics was to except the impossibility of uselessly formalizing the formalism you might choose to discipline your thinking in the background but which Debreu proves and Keynes recently vindicated "General Theory" demonstrates tend to obfuscate the economics.

Economics was a great discipline but we have now got to accept it has been wrong headed in its driving mentality for the last half century and seek other ways to pursue the study of the economy consonant with the traditions that died with Hicks Pigou and Schumpter and has not yet died in the person of Paul Samuelson whose beautifully crafted piece on Economic Analysis makes two things very clear. One if you cannot explain it to a wife uneducated in economics it is definitely bad economics and if anyway comparative static analysis which the General Equilibrium people revel in is only a tiny tiny part of the economics discipline which needs to embrace dynamics,in smooth, stochastic and historic spaces where completeness, differentiability and ceteris parabus writs do not run.