>It's very interesting to me that presenting an incoherent argument, and insisting that anyone who doesn't understand it is ignorant, is a highly successful deb

>It's very interesting to me that presenting an incoherent argument, and insisting that anyone who doesn't understand it is ignorant, is a highly successful debating tactic. This is why an awful lot of economics papers use very complex math. It's a way of intimidating critics. For many of these papers, while the math is usually not exactly wrong, one quick glance at the unrealistic assumptions at the beginning of the paper is enough to invalidate the entire thing. Since these papers are often used as a pretext to justify economic policy, this is a not unimportant part of how your wages, spending power and wealth is determined.