Tudi sam se velikokrat počutim zelo podobno kot angleški fiziki, ki jih je leta 1842 nemški matematik Carl Gustav Jacobi na vabljenem predavanju s ponosom šokiral z izjavo “It is the glory of science to be of no use“. Tudi sodobna ekonomija je v precejšnji meri zabredla v “lepoto” kompleksnih matematičnih modelov, ki se zdijo, da so zgolj sami sebi namen. Toda podobno kot matematika zna biti tudi teoretična ekonomija mnogokrat zelo uporabna v praksi (denimo pri avkcijah ipd.).

No, pri nas (v ekonomiji) za razliko od matematike manjka še splošno spoznanje, da je nek pogled (teorija) samo ena izmed možnih pojasnitev realnosti in da ne obstaja Velika enotna teorija (Grand unified theory). Potrebujemo demokratizacijo ekonomske vede v učbenikih.

Jacobi made few converts that day. His declaration, he reported to his brother with satisfaction, “caused a vehement shaking of heads,” which was only to be expected from a crowd of men who were devoting their careers to improving industrial processes in the manufacturing capital of Europe. But things were different among Jacobi’s mathematical colleagues, who increasingly came to share his view that mathematical truths stood for themselves, and needed no further justification.

To be sure, no one (including Jacobi) denies that some fields of mathematics have proven extremely useful, and had made modern technology possible. But other fields, including some of the greatest mathematical discoveries ever, seem to serve no practical purpose whatsoever.

…

Much like the Romantic painters, poets and composers of the age, mathematicians were reaching out to a pure realm of truth and beauty, away from our flawed and fallen world. And at the turn of the 20^th century the mathematical field of non-Euclidean geometry upended seemingly self-evident assumptions about reality. Our Euclidean world was revealed to be just one of an infinity of possible ones, a discovery that profoundly impacted modernist art and literature, with its multiplicity of perspectives and absence of a single, unifying narrative.

Preberite več v Amir Alexander, Scientific American