So who is really to blame? Theophrastus is who. It is the Ecologists who asserted that all human existence and behaviour can be reduced to a formula and number that begat the rot. We're all digits in the computer of life. Hence the belief that all outcomes can be predicted by formulae - the best of which get a Nobel Prize - hence Game Theory et al. Thus, according to this poppycock, the chances of your best mate fucking your wife are the same as those for a, soon to be cuckolded, Rwandan Gorilla. And there is an elegant formula to prove it.
Never mind that these theories are disproved by reality - the relationship between wolf and bison populations isn't linear any more than a Credit Default Swap takes all the risk out of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. Given the Self excluding nature of these theories, "this is a load of bollocks" is an unapproved response as you can't be outside a universal, mathematically elegant, truth.
This brings us to the truly head banging realisation that the same theory is used to prove opposite ends of the same argument. Those arguing for expansion of the planet's economy are using the same mathematical models as those bitterly opposed to it. Your Goldman Sach's Quant is more like a Greenpeace Eco-warrior than either of them care to admit - even if they realised it. Neither of them take individual behaviour into account as it isn't permitted by the model. Unpredictable individual behaviour is so anathema to an elegant mathematical solution that they invented a means to do away with it - Chaos Theory. When this was challenged by some bright spark that wondered how this could apply universally they invented Fractals. We're all predictably the same - have to be - or the models don't work. Then one day, somehow, somebody let the smoke out of the computer.
Now you'd wonder why any cognitive being would subscribe to an outcome where they're regarded as mathematical rather than biological. But it seems that rather than accept that not everything can be predicted by digits they concluded that there must be a "Theory of Everything". Which brings us, alas, to the purveyors of String Theory. Faced with the reality that most of the mathturbation that got them to this point is based upon giant assumptions that ignore the tricky bit between Particles and Relativity they spent decades introducing invisible dimensions and multiple universes but still couldn't get the numbers to work. The results have all been Infinity. Fear not say these intrepid number doodlers we'll insist that we're on the right track and give our grant money a new name "M Theory". Unfortunately this didn't stop the grants from shrinking so a lot of mathematical physicists were looking for a job just at the time that unregulated financial markets boomed. "I know a theory that takes all the risk out of stupidity" they said, "because we can predict the future - it's just like wolves and bison. Even if it isn't, we have another model that proves you can't lose." What they overlooked to mention is that they couldn't find Gravity and three quarters of Matter and Energy.
In a world where everything can be predicted in numbers and theories nothing else matters - yea, right! Unfortunately, economists didn't seem to realise that any theory that always ends up at Infinity wouldn't, in fact, work. Especially as the same theory could be used to arrive at both plus-infinity and minus-infinity simultaneously. Surely this would raise a few heads, you'd think - not if we're making so much money that it has to be right - QED. Wrong - somebody forgot that the rich like to, whenever and wherever possible, fuck the poor. The theory choked financial system, politically manipulated, permitted the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. The theory was that by exporting our poverty we'd all be better off and spend our time having our hair done or buying a flat screen TV. While the people that got our poverty would be delighted to have it as they live on less than $2 a day. Corporations loved it. The rich loved it. The poor, and increasingly the middle-class, got fucked.
Now what would have happened if chemists rather than physicists had come up with economic and financial theories. Well, chemists don't have any vague theories, they do have Principles. Principles, many and varied, are the key missing ingredients in mathematical financial theories - none of which have empirical proof outside of mathematics. So chemists would probably have done a better job. They don't join molecules together in an invisible dimension or another universe. Nor can they fill a test tube with ingredients that only exist in theory - they might try something that does exist. Not so Physicists - they just keep flogging this dead horse in the hope that it will, theoretically, come back to life - somewhere in the 15th dimension or in the billionth universe. If you believe String (M) Theory it is happening in a Universe near you right .... now.
My suggestion is that chemists round up all physicists and lock them up in a Silo. Where they can plan a theoretical escape.
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