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Such oversights have led critics to charge that many forecasters are too preoccupied with mathematics to see what is happening in the real world. Says Consultant Rinfret: "Economists prefer mathematical models because they are elegant and orderly. But markets are never neat and orderly. They are full of surprises." As indeed are people. Wassily Leontief, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economics, bitterly complains that "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." Economists, says Leontief, are "great bores" who operate in "splendid isolation."
The stress on mathematics, which makes a large part of economics incomprehensible to laymen, is a relatively modern development. Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other founding fathers of economics were far more concerned with broad social and political issues than with numerical precision. Says Economist Robert Heilbroner: "They were worldly philosophers who turned out to be great visionaries." But as the discipline developed, the interests of many researchers grew narrower. "We have almost reached the point," says M.I.T.'s Thurow, "where if you can't quantify it, you can't say it."
Mathematical economists have longed to turn their field into an exact science that could predict business developments as precisely as Sir Isaac Newton was able to set down the laws of motion. "Economics inserted itself into the determinist universe of Newton," says Herbert Giersch, director of the Institute for World Economics in West Germany, "in order to gain dignity as a science." That effort has led not only to econometric models but also to elaborate mathematical systems with few practical applications. Last year, Gerard Debreu, a University of California, Berkeley, economist, won the Nobel Prize largely for a purely theoretical description of a perfectly functioning economy.
Perhaps because Americans love gadgets and instant answers, the trend toward mathematical economics has taken hold more firmly in the U.S. than abroad. In Europe, the birthplace of economics, practitioners have more often maintained a philosophical attitude (see box). Says British Economist Samuel Brittan: "I do not think Europeans were ever as credulous, and they have been less impressed by numbers." The prestige of economists has thus not sunk as far in the Old World as it has in the U.S., since it was never as high to begin with.
In America, the 1960s were a golden age for economists. The period was relatively free of economic turmoil, and under Heller's tutelage, the Kennedy Administration proposed and the Johnson White House put into effect a tax cut that worked precisely as promised by spurring growth without aggravating inflation. The success of that policy was a striking victory for the theories of John Maynard