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Economics would also be really hard to understand if it didn't operate on the real world: something very familiar to us. I can imagine a mathematical version o

Economics would also be really hard to understand if it didn't operate on the real world: something very familiar to us. I can imagine a mathematical version of economics operating on some abstract constructs designed to emulate an economic system. It would reuse no terminology from the real world for the sake of producing an abstract notion, completely (or at least artificially) decoupled from the system it was designed to emulate. I would imagine that Akerlofs paper, encoded into this form, would be at least as hard and involved to understand as the one from Atiyah.

xyzzyz 9y ago
As long as the as the "abstract constructs" themselves weren't much more complicated than the current real-world economic concepts, it would only be slightly more difficult. You would need some background reading, but not any more than skimming relevant Wikipedia articles for definitions. And in that case, you'd have every reason to be pissed at economists who don't present their findings in much simpler and obvious way. If, however, the abstract constructs were much more complicated then the current economic concepts, and if you were trying to solve problems on much higher level of abstraction than economists currently are, then it would just be mathematics, and indeed it would be more difficult. I, personally, cannot imagine how you could rewrite Akerlof's paper to be as hard to understand as Atiyah's. I can, with great difficulty, follow Atiyah's paper only because I spent literally _years_ learning the necessary background material. I am completely unable to relay my understanding to someone who hasn't spent years doing the same. I wish I was -- I'd revolutionize algebraic geometry then, just like Alexander Grothendieck revolutionized it around when the Atiyah's paper was written. On the other hand, if someone rewrote Akerlof's paper in an intentionally obscure way, you could easily rewrite it back in a clear way, once you spend the effort to understand the obscure version yourself.

xyzzyz 9y ago

As long as the as the "abstract constructs" themselves weren't much more complicated than the current real-world economic concepts, it would only be slightly more difficult. You would need some background reading, but not any more than skimming relevant Wikipedia articles for definitions. And in that case, you'd have every reason to be pissed at economists who don't present their findings in much simpler and obvious way. If, however, the abstract constructs were much more complicated then the current economic concepts, and if you were trying to solve problems on much higher level of abstraction than economists currently are, then it would just be mathematics, and indeed it would be more difficult. I, personally, cannot imagine how you could rewrite Akerlof's paper to be as hard to understand as Atiyah's. I can, with great difficulty, follow Atiyah's paper only because I spent literally _years_ learning the necessary background material. I am completely unable to relay my understanding to someone who hasn't spent years doing the same. I wish I was -- I'd revolutionize algebraic geometry then, just like Alexander Grothendieck revolutionized it around when the Atiyah's paper was written. On the other hand, if someone rewrote Akerlof's paper in an intentionally obscure way, you could easily rewrite it back in a clear way, once you spend the effort to understand the obscure version yourself.