Talk:Physics envy

The envy of economists
I've had a number of discussions with an economist about mathematics in Economics. We are in agreement that Economics belongs to the social sciences but that economists dearly want to be regarded as natural scientists. There is one thing that has to be mentioned. Those who brought economics on a mathematical footing were for the most part not economists originally but mathematicians or physicists using their training to develop models. They knew with perfect clarity that that's all they were doing - creating models. But then their students, who didn't have their background, carried on and the models took on a life of their own. You can easily find economists having heated discussions about the fifth digit after the decimal point in some model or other. But you can't really blame the originators of the models since they knew what they were doing. The Philips curve is another example. Philips was an electrical engineer who had a good idea and he knew which variables were being described and which data he was using. Since then oceans of wasted ink have been spilled on a subject that is far too complex to be reducible to one graph. Among other things, the Philips curve shifts with time. Cheerio Sorte Slyngel (talk) 22:26, 5 September 2015 (UTC)