Throwing Out Theorems

Long ago I was told the tale of an ancient shaman who, approached by a woman who seemed incapable of bearing a child, suggested she sleep with her husband on a lion’s hide.  Lo and behold she gave birth shortly thereafter to a son.  A curious friend who also was barren asked her what caused the miracle.  Thereupon she too visited the shaman, was given a tiger’s hide, and subsequently delivered a baby boy.  Word spread and a third woman, similarly afflicted, visited the shaman, received a hippo hide, and gave birth to twin boys!  Pythagoras learned of this and ultimately concluded that the sum of the sons of the hippopotamus is equal to the sum of the sons of the other two hides.

As you know, Pythagoras went on to fame as both a great mathematician and religious cult guru.  He may have developed the idea that music and all of nature, including the heavens, is perfectly ordered by proportion and mathematical relationships reducible to whole numbers.  One of his students, a fellow named Hippassus, tried to point out a flaw in this reasoning, namely that for a given right triangle with two sides both measuring exactly one unit, the hypotenuse would have to equal the square root of two, an irrational number.  Subsequently, Big P apparently had him drowned, thus ending the discussion.

Economics, as a field of study, may best be described as a source of employment for economists.  Take the Federal Reserve (please!) as an example.  It is loaded with PhDs learned in that field.  In fact, it is said, if you lined all of them up head to toe, you still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.  They have attempted to guide U.S. economic policy since their formation back in 1913.  Having applied that wisdom they admit it was a primary contributor to the Great Depression.  But that was then.  Now they are trying to explain why accepted theories with eponymous names like the Philips Curve and Taylor Rule don’t seem to be holding true any longer.  Atlas believes that correlation does not equal causation and that may possibly be the case here.  We’ll see if they invent a new theory to describe how many central bankers can dance on the head of a pin.    (by J R)