Abstract

Even the briefest and most superficial perusal of leading mainstream economics journals will attest to the degree that mathematical formalism has captured the economics profession. Whereas up to the early 20th century virtually all of the output of the dismal scientists was in the literary format, by the early 21st century this is not at all any longer the case. Mathematical formalism is supposed to serve economics, and yet now true economic insight has been crowded out by the math. If mainstream neoclassical economics is to come back to its proper path, a far less central role for mathematical economics, statistics and econometrics will have to be fashioned.