TheMarketForIdeas

I don’t know if Bertrand Russell, the famous and fabulous logician and philosopher, writer and civic activist (arrested, at 89, at an anti-nuclear protest, foreshadowing the roughing up, some 13 years ago, of a Romanian mathematician at an anti-real estate developer protest), would have liked the play on words in the subtitle. No more, no less, the Briton sought to rebuild mathematics entirely, emptying it of the rubble of overly specific notions, such as “number” or “square root”, in favour of pure concepts, such as “proposition” or “class”. The Russellian, logical reordering of mathematics follows the Newtonian, mathematical reordering of the natural sciences, but the logic of the physicist-mathematization of the social sciences is much shakier ground, despite its spread. From the arithmetic of the modest merchants to the econometrics of the modern mandarins, something makes it so that neither derivatives nor integrals automatically produce economic growth nor balanced budgets. Mathematical sciences are still exhibiting a quite majestic incapacitation.

The laws that govern (inter)personal actions differ from those that operate particles; then legislations, be they democratic or despotic, can be aligned or not with those natural laws of human intercourse; and, finally, lawlessness is either a source of chaos (in the free world) or a safety valve (within ghettos and gulags). Mathematics has a pretty bad record in distinguishing between good and evil. It complicitly optimizes both. As “more than” simple natural and living entities, humans remember and anticipate, regret and change, all in a potpourri of actions strongly imbued with historical, cultural, and moral sociality. No equation or function has ever truly captured the anguish of unemployment, the slow erosion of civic trust, or the contagious fury of a financial bubble. And while mainstream economists have become hyper-mathematical, they have objectified everything to the point of forgetting the very “subject”: there is a huge difference between measuring how an apple falls from a tree (velocity, position) and grasping why a nation fails (causes, contexts).

Whenever we talk about a dominant current, there are also swimmers upstream, towards the source of simplicity of thought, in the contemporary deluge of complexity from which only AI can save us (by shutting us down?!). Often caricatured as archaic or anti-scientific, the Austrian School of economics draws attention, with unflinching methodological modesty, to the fact that economics’ working material is not “a combination of preferences and constraints”, but the real human being, the one subject to error: (s)he chooses, hesitates, makes mistakes. Economic life is subjective, not mechanical, and value does not reside in things, but in judgments. The endemic grammar of mathematics, when extended on societies, overly simplifies things in a complicated way. We know, mathematics feeds on certainty, clarity, consistency. But economies are teeming with surprises, ambiguities, and many game-changers. Moreover, mathematization has never been too passive, but overtly procrustean. Remember the New Man of the scientific socialism! Is transhumanism next?

This does not mean that mathematics is useless. On the contrary. Structure, order, and relationships are part of the hygiene of reason. But when formalism becomes a fetish, when economists confuse maps with territory, we lose sight of the human experience at the centre. A middle way is suggested: to model economies as evolutionary systems, where agents learn and adapt, but here too caution is needed. The elegance of a model should not excuse detachment from reality: better an economist who speaks clearly about real people, than one who mumbles panel regressions to ferocious questions: “why do we still have extreme poverty in the contemporary world?”, but also “how can hasty equalization could destroy our societal ecosystems?”. True, economic mathematics is paradoxical: consuming equations in a world that produces inequalities! Could they be just statistical errors? Or moral failures of a system that judges in margins and maximizations? The sin of mathematized economics is not that it may be wrong, but that it does not “notice” its subjects.

What are we going to do with a president-mathematician (vaguely resembling a philosopher-king) at the Cotroceni Palace? His function is rather symbolic from the standpoint of economic policy. The Romanian Constitution tells us so. However, how could we… figure this function… mathematically? Monotonic? If so, increasing or decreasing? In other words, should the president be increasingly authoritative in society (even if that’s not the case)?; or increasingly discreet (to the point of being a figurehead)? Mathematical language proves, once more, to be confusing in such an exercise of describing or prescribing the standard of the function of “head of state”. Again, the good old natural language, with its denotative-connotative features, can better respond to the need for qualifying (before quantifying): for instance, we could assume that a good president for the country is one who does not distribute “dignities” that would subtract from his dignity and does not add “honours” that would minimize his honour. Oh, snap!, the maths linguistic boomerang stroke back…