Peter Klein agrees with Paul Krugman that economists have mistaken beauty for truth, but disagrees that it has anything to do with the financial crisis so he won’t be signing the Hodgson petition.
Also at the Organizations and Markets blog, Nicolai Foss discusses a special journal issue entitled “Economic Models as Credible Worlds or as Isolating Tools?”
Speaking of models and truth and beauty, I found Murray Gell-Mann’s TED Talk fascinating. He argues that in physics, a beautiful theory is more likely to be true. This makes me a little nervous. I would be especially worried about using this heuristic in the social sciences because the objects we are studying are complex, and have so much meaning to us that our aesthetic sense is more likely to attach to theories for reason other than truth. Truth may be beautiful, but so are our cognitive biases and ideologies.
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