From my tweets this morning, best read from the bottom up on this occasion:
With thanks to Helen Schofield whose suggestions provided my reading last night.
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If Keynes said “it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong” – if he did, I’ve not found it – he was paraphrasing the philosopher Carvath Read, in Chapter 22 of his 1898 book “Logic”. Here is the whole paragraph (**emphasis added**) from the 1920 edition, but I think this has not changed from the first edition:
“The terms of ordinary language fall into the same classes as those of science: they stand for things, classes of things, parts, or qualities, or activities of things; but they are far less precise in their signification. As long as popular thought is vague its language must be vague; nor is it desirable too strictly to correct the language whilst the thought is incorrigible. Much of the effect of poetry and eloquence depends upon the elasticity and indirect suggestiveness of common terms. Even in reasoning upon some subjects, it is a mistake to aim at an unattainable precision. ** It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong. ** In the criticism of manners, of fine art, or of literature, in politics, religion and moral philosophy, what we are anxious to say is often far from clear to ourselves; and it is better to indicate our meaning approximately, or as we feel about it, than to convey a false meaning, or to lose the warmth and colour that are the life of such reflections. It is hard to decide whether more harm has been done by sophists who take a base advantage of the vagueness of common terms, or by honest paralogists (if I may use the word) who begin by deceiving themselves with a plausible definiteness of expression, and go on to propagate their delusions amongst followers eager for systematic insight but ignorant of the limits of its possibility.”
He was talking about the imprecision of language, but the same thought applies to the misleadingly false precision of numbers unless one understands all of the potential errors and uncertainties. Show me the errors bars, the 90% or 95% confidence interval, and the sensitivity analysis. There is a reason participle physicists demand evidence at the five-sigma (99.9999%) level before they are confident of what they think they are seeing.
The theoretical project of building a grand all-encompassing unified theory of economics from the ground up from basic “laws” of microeconomics – like is was a branch of mathematics or physics – has failed. If theories don’t work in practice, they need to be discarded in favour of explanations that do actually work and have predictive power. Anything else is just a faith-based or ideological position.
Thanks
I agree – whether Keynes said it, or knowingly quoted Read – will remains unknown
The rest of what you say is more than vaguely right
Glad not to be exactly wrong, but I do needed to correct one of my more egregious typos: I meant “particle physicists” – although in this linguistic context “participle physicists” sounds almost right. There is cryptic crossword clue in there somewhere. “Boson incorporating patent”, perhaps?
🙂
I’ll just add that this tendency for a quotation to be (mis)attributed to a famous person who might have said it (instead of the less known person who actually did) has been dubbed “Churchillian drift” by Nigel Rees. For example: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/11/14/churchillian-drift/
Typically, the quotation is attributed to someone like George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Abraham Lincoln, or Mark Twain.
In an economics context, perhaps it would be Keynes or Marx…