Emory University
Dept. of Economics
Atlanta, GA 30322

Office: 326 Rich Bldg.
Phone: (404) 712-9297
Fax: (404) 727-4639
email

Welcome

"All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They're adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one." S. Cappell - Courant Institute of Mathematics "Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results." John Maynard Keynes "I would rather be vaguely right, than precisely wrong." John Maynard Keynes

"Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions."

"...the real world is not as rational and dynamically optimal as economists would like to believe."

"It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense."

"Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness."

"It is universally appreciated, I think, that theorists are able to tweak their assumptions in order to reach any conclusion they wish. The believability of the conclusion depends not only on the fact that it was reached but on how hard the theorist had to tweak the model to get there."