>>13262249This is absolutely insane. I'm not trying to be dismissive here, but this shows that you haven't reached the graduate level in econ - again, nothing against you, but you would never say this if you had. Go read some articles from an econ journal. Applied econ papers are rife with obfuscation through 'rigour'. Theoretical papers make unjustified assumptions in footnotes and then barrel through pages upon pages of proofs to get results that are completely useless -- this is not in service of clarity, it's just not.
I'm the poster above who is in a PhD program, training to be a theorist, I rely on math every single day and in every bit of research I do. That doesn't mean that econ doesn't have a physics envy problem. The claims about clarity are true when it comes to the groundwork for fields. The mathematizing that occurred in the mid 20th century was justified math. Some fields require extreme rigour or higher level maths by necessity - some mech design, econometric theory, macro dynamics - but just go read any random journal and tell me the math in most papers is there for clarity. Clarity in econ necessarily relies on clarity of thought and idea. Go read some of Schelling's papers, or Olsen's -- no math, extremely clear, and laid the foundation for further technical work. Go read the early market design papers, very cleary, and often very technical. Math provides clarity when it needs to, but more often than not in econ it obfuscates. I'm not some undergrad complaining that we had to take derivatives in intermediate micro.
