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Th irony of this piece is that this post is itself pure academic posturing and politics.

• jacobolus 11y ago
  Why is this “ironic”? Romer thinks the reputation of his whole field is at stake if they don’t agree to some common norms about the purpose being to seek the truth, and he’s therefore calling out economists who he thinks don’t abide by the norms he prefers. Of course it’s “politics”, in the same way it’s “politics” when an experimental physicist calls out string theory for being unfalsifiable.
  • bachmeier 11y ago
    > Of course it’s “politics”, in the same way it’s “politics” when an experimental physicist calls out string theory for being unfalsifiable. Not really. It's as though he's calling out someone for presenting results that show the Earth rotates around the sun, but then in the text of the paper says the results show the opposite.
    • jacobolus 11y ago
      It’s not literally an identical criticism, that’s just an analogy. The point is that both epistemic critiques are similarly “political”, in the sense that they are about professional norms and goals and are abstracted from the precise details of the work in question. Anyway, his primary point isn’t about “mathiness” per se, but rather about the way (he claims) a particular group of economists refuse to admit that their theory turned out to be wrong when put to real-world tests. The “mathiness” part is just one of the ways he thinks they try to deflect criticism through confusion/obscurity. (Note, in my comments here I’m not judging the validity of any of these arguments one way or the other.)