I watched Oppenheimer last night, not for the first time. And not for the first time, this exchange stood out:
Niels Bohr: Algebra's like sheet music, the important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.
Why does this exchange resonate? That is because Bohr could just as easily have been asking almost any neoclassical or neoliberal economist alive today that question, and the honest answer most could give would be: "No, I cannot."
There is a good reason for that. Bohr was not asking whether Oppenheimer could do the mathematics inherent in physics. That was a given. He was asking something far more demanding, which was whether Oppenheimer understood what the mathematics meant.
Could he connect the symbols used to reality?
Could he hear the implications behind the equations?
Could he grasp the consequences of what he was helping to create?
Bohr was, in other words, probing the difference between technical proficiency and understanding. And that distinction matters far more than modern economics is prepared to admit.
That is because physics and economics have, on occasion. shared a dangerous tendency to mistake formal skill with mathematics for insight. In both disciplines, practitioners can become absorbed in calculation, optimisation, and internal consistency, whilst models become admired for their elegance rather than questioned for their relevance. Mathematical fluency becomes a badge of authority. Worse, there is the risk that reality is expected to conform to the model, and not the other way round.
In economics, this tendency is now dominant. Mastery of abstract financial and mathematical models is treated as proof of expertise, and these models have become the foundations of financial capitalism. But those models are often detached from lived experience, institutional reality, power relations, and ecological constraints.
The result is a form of economics that can calculate almost anything, but which understands virtually nothing, a fact that is key to the economic and social failure we now see all around us.
As both Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer understood, building a nuclear bomb was one thing. Understanding the consequences of doing so was something else entirely.
The former is a technical achievement.
The latter is about moral, social and political reckoning.
That distinction is precisely what modern economics has lost.
Being able to manipulate the models that underpin financial capitalism does not imply any capacity to understand the consequences of that system for society. Yet economists are trained, and rewarded, almost exclusively for their ability to operate those models, and not to interrogate their effects.
Financial capitalism is, then, read but misunderstood music, sustained by models that abstract away:
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power,
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distribution,
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institutional fragility,
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environmental limits, and
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human well-being.
Economists who work within this framework may be technically brilliant. They can supposedly price risk, discount futures, optimise portfolios, and forecast growth paths. But many cannot explain, or even recognise, the social damage those same systems produce.
They cannot hear the music.
They can read the economic formulae - the sheet music in the metaphor - fluently. They can perform the algebra with confidence. But they no longer ask what the performance does to the audience, or who is being harmed in the process.
This failure is not just academic. It has structural significance. When understanding is displaced by technique:
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inequality is treated as an externality,
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institutional decay is ignored,
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care is rendered invisible, and
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ecological breakdown is postponed to a footnote.
Policy becomes an exercise in model management rather than social stewardship, whilst democratic accountability erodes because the language of economics becomes inaccessible and, therefore, unquestionable.
Exactly as Bohr warned, the danger lies not in ignorance, but in competence without comprehension.
What does this mean? The implication should be obvious. If the mainstream of economics is to serve society, it must relearn how to hear the music.
That means treating models as tools, not truths.
It means grounding economic reasoning in institutions, care, maintenance, and consequence.
And it means judging economic success not by internal coherence but by social outcomes, because it is people that economics must serve, and not markets, finance, or power. Until that happens, we will remain governed by people who can read the notes perfectly while remaining deaf to what their work is actually doing.
That is why what Bohr supposedly asked Oppenheimer resonated with me.
This blog is about understanding the music of real-world economics and really hearing what it has to say. That matters because what I think Bohr was saying is, "There is a better song to sing, if only we can hear it," and that is a recurring theme of this blog.
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[…] wrote earlier today about the difference between being able to perform calculations and understanding what they mean. […]
I watched several YouTube videos created by financial planners in an attempt to better understand how to manage my pension drawdown in retirement. I was amazed at how much effort some of them make, to justify a given Safe Withdrawal Rate. Monte Carlo simulations run against financial data from the last 100 years seem to be often used as “proof” that a particular SWR can be used with confidence of not running out of cash, regardless of whatever economic conditions might prevail.
They always add the disclaimer “Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results”. Yet they seem to have convinced themselves that it really is.
True
Simply put, there is no ‘safe withdrawal rate’. Hubris & hyperbole to justify ongoing fees, yes, along with the dubious ‘magic’ of easily manipulated ‘cashflow modelling’ software and unconscionable ‘stochastic modelling’. In truth, it’s all about keeping as few hands in your pockets as possible (which can be done).
🙂
And agreed
Great .summation of your project.
Happy New Year to you and family
Thanks
You could say the alternative nuclear music is the massive rabbit hole of nuclear power generation. Too cheap to meter at first (ha ha) never mind Windcale/,Sellafield accidents, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ,they still plough on with this monster creating deadly radioactive waste that can’t disposed of safely.
Now we are told that Sizewell C cost of construction cost has risen from £20 billion to £38 billion, money no object obviously (don’t mention the delays and cost overuns of the yet to be completed Hinckley C station)
Nuclear power/nuclear weapons are the British establishment’s touchstone for ‘Great Power’ status. Carlo Ravelli still thinks nuclear weapons are the main danger to our existence in the short term – although in the medium/longer term it is climate change.
I agree that nuclear technologies carry serious risks and history shows why they must be handled with respect. But it’s also important to acknowledge the other half of the story. Nuclear science has given humanity extraordinary gains — from cancer treatment and medical imaging to industrial testing, food safety, and deep‑space exploration. And we are now closer to practical fusion than ever before, not in a science‑fiction sense but in a real engineering sense. If we crack it, we’re talking about virtually limitless clean energy with no meltdown risk and no long‑lived waste.
There’s also the uncomfortable truth that nuclear weapons, for all their horror, created a deterrent equilibrium that prevented major‑power conflict for decades. Not something to celebrate, but something to recognise.
So yes, the dangers are real. But nuclear science is not a simple story of fear. It’s a story of risk, responsibility, progress, and — paradoxically — stability. The challenge isn’t to reject powerful tools, but to steward them wisely.
That is such an appropriate parallel. Bohr’s atomic theory was itself just a step towards some kind of understanding of the nature of matter and was superseded by more sophisticated models, all of which are just that – models with limitations due to the assumptions behind them.
Bliadhna mhath ùr!
And to you!
‘Oppenheimer’ is one hell of a weird film – Christopher Nolan is a very inconsistent director (can anyone remember Dunkirk, and the 1940’s soldiers returning to a mid-1950’s British Rail Mark 1 late 1960s blue coach? Ouch! And it was crap) – the best part for me is how Oppenheimer had his national security clearance undermined because of what? – jealousy? And the film never really gets to the bottom of the moral issues of Oppenheimer’s quest but somehow we get sex scenes in a film about physics. Hmmm………..keep at it Chris – Interstellar was more like it, flawed as it was.
Anyhow, I could not agree more about what could be called ‘the tyranny of numbers’ in a social science like economics? The universe does not work like that ergo, nothing really exists (does it?) in splendid isolation? It’s all about cause and effect – that is REAL science, real objectivity, real observation.
What we have in economics and finance is nothing more but the math of ignorance.
Agreed re Nolan, his inconsistency and the irrelevance of the sex scenes in Oppenheimer.
But your best point is your last one.
No steer, the Treasury and the Department for Education most certainly do not hear the music.
The latest “because we can’t afford it ruse”? Let’s strip out support for parents of neurodivergent children and limit it to the “most severe and complex cases”.
Result? Let’s condemn our neurodivergent young people to the scrap heap before they even start education.
Agreed, entirely.
I am horrified by this, and the power to give the legal right parents have had to schools.
The SEND proposal is pure madness, and it is only happening because the issue is invisible. To use a corollary:
I am very short-sighted. Always have been. At school I always sat in the front row. I felt most comfortable there. When I was 7 my parents took me to an optician who prescribed glasses. My aunt told my mother she was very stupid to let me wear them all the time as it would make my eyesight worse. I was amazed – the world was a brand new place. It was miraculous. It didn’t last long, though. Within 6 months I had a newer, stronger prescription. and that repeated throughout my childhood until I got contact lenses in the 70’s.
My point is that my need for eyesight correction when I first got it was not obvious to anyone, including me. My need for help was not as strong as the need of someone who had no vision at all. I could, almost certainly, have struggled on for another couple of years, but my education would have suffered, as would many aspects of my life. But the fact that I needed help could be measured and the appropriate help could also be measured.
Neurodivergence is currently less measurable and the help needed may have to be individually designed. But to suggest only helping those most in need would be the equivalent of not letting me wear glasses until my vision was non-existent. No one would advocate that – how can some advocate the equivalent for those who are neurodivergent?
So much to agree with.
Thank you
I have seen the film – but only once, but I do now have the DVD.
Within the film it appears that both Oppenheimer and Einstein held dubious views regarding politicians and governments – little has changed!
As for ‘hearing the music’ – Einstein had a great love of music. Maths, sciences and music are, to me, interrelated and I have studied them all – they have a shape, a pattern and when I worked in various offices of Chartered Accountants, I used to advise the young trainees to look at the shape of the figures, both inside and outside that shape – it was an excellent audit and/or investigation method. With music, look at the score, listen to the notes and a shape will evolve – so much enjoyment.
When I was told by my Father (it was in the days when you did what your were told to!) that I could not take up music as a career, the next thought was to become an accountant. All the way through my career as a Chartered Accountant, I tried to hear the music – I hope this helped in my interaction with others although I have to admit that, in regards, to interaction with politicians, I have been a dismal failure – they fail to hear the music.
Great story
with apologies for 2nd post – I have recently received the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival (Britten Pears) programme. I have noted a comment therein regarding a talk to be given by the pianist Steven Osborne “Music’s meaning can be deeply personal, yet wordlessly communicated to a roomful of strangers in a concert hall.”
Knowing of Einstein’s love of music, and indeed his skill in playing the violin, in or around 1948, Oppenheimer gifted him an FM radio and had an antenna installed on his house so that he may listen to New York Philharmonic concerts from Manhattan.
I believe that music was deeply personal to Einstein, Oppenheimer understood that. Although the 2 men had disagreements on some scientific matters, Oppenheimer showed that he cared. If only more could do that.
Susan I’m interested in your comment as I had parallel twin careers as a Chartered Accountant (46 years) and musician (c60 years). I’ve never seen any relationship between music and maths, however I do see a relationship between music and language: both are means of communication. The role of language is obviously to communicate verbally while, in my view, instrumental music’s role is to communicate on an emotional level, with the listener having the freedom to interpret at will the musicians’ emotional intentions.
I can recall the exact moment when this struck me: I’d be about 16 years old and was utterly riveted on hearing a live concert recording of Louis Armstrong playing his mentor’s tune, West End Blues. He played with such emotional power it felt as though he was speaking to me. The same goes for great classical music and folk music etc performances. It’s why the emotion-laden compositions of Mozart, Beethoven etc are still so widely performed in classical music. It’s also what makes the great singers of all musical genres stand out from the rest: they sound as if they’re telling their story and singing to you alone, although I get it that others are having the same experience too. I find that much pop music doesn’t speak to me at all. Some does, but much pop music is about making money quickly and, if it continues to be played frequently over a long period, that’s a bonus.
PSR wrote about “the tyranny of numbers” in economics, while Dizzy Gillespie talked of “the tyranny of the back beat” – the unrelenting heavy drum offbeats in pop music. You keep good company PSR!
Thanks, Ken.
And 🙂
I’m reminded of the Einstein quote: “Any fool can know. The point is to understand”. Regrettably it is very apparent that many technocratic politicians and economists are people whose knowledge is impressive but understand little about how their knowledge impacts the real world. Rachel Reeves in particular comes across as someone who knows a lot but understands little about how the economy works. I think the education system is culpable for training people to memorise facts, figures and models at the expense of acquiring understanding.
I’m reminded of The Incredible String Band chorus:
“Oh, you know all the words and you sung all the notes
But you never quite learned the song”
Agreed
Or Eric Morecambe, of course…
Happy New Year Richard.
I like the way you connect Bohr’s comments about hearing the music to understanding economics. I meet so many people who have studied economics for years without gaining insight into how economies actually function.
Fun fact about Niels Bohr, who famously escaped from Nazi occupied Denmark via Sweden, from where he took the Ball Bearing flight to Scotland on a Mosquito flown by the Royal Norwegian Air Force. My uncle, Albert Christensen, set up and handled the operation on the Denmark side where, needless to say, Bohr was being kept under constant surveillance.
Wow
I’ve known you for nearly a quarter of a century and I’ve never heard that before!
Happy New Year
Richard, this is one of your most resonant pieces because it names something that sits beneath almost every failure of modern economics: the inability to hear what the models are actually doing to people.
The Bohr–Oppenheimer metaphor is perfect.
Most mainstream economists can read the sheet music fluently — the algebra, the optimisation, the discounting — but they cannot hear the composition those notes produce in the real world. They hear technique, not consequence.
And that is why the discipline keeps mistaking poverty for the problem, rather than the symptom.
Poverty is the audible discord.
Deprivation is the underlying score.
You can calculate poverty.
You can model poverty.
You can even “cost” poverty.
But deprivation — the long-term erosion of security, stability, public capacity, and institutional care — is what the music means. And that is precisely what the models ignore.
Neoliberalism didn’t just elevate markets.
It elevated mathematical fluency over understanding, technique over judgement, and internal coherence over social consequence. It trained generations of economists to read the notes while remaining deaf to the harm the performance inflicts on the audience.
That is why austerity could be sold as “responsible”.
That is why inequality could be treated as an externality.
That is why institutional decay could be ignored.
That is why deprivation could be rendered invisible.
The models said everything was fine.
The music said otherwise.
And this is where I think your argument lands with real force: if economics is to serve society, it must stop treating its models as truths and start treating them as tools. Tools that must be judged by their outcomes — not their elegance.
Because the world doesn’t suffer from a shortage of algebra.
It suffers from a shortage of understanding.
We don’t need better notes.
We need to hear the song.
And until economics can hear the music of deprivation — the slow, grinding, systemic erosion of the conditions that make life liveable — it will continue to produce policies that are technically impressive and socially catastrophic.
There is a better song to sing.
But we won’t find it by perfecting the notation.
We’ll find it by listening to the world the models claim to describe.
Thanks, Paul
Appreciated
And very good
Richard (all), lots of comments in last couple of days about the problems of applying maths too rigidly to aspects of economics. Sometimes folk have blamed the maths ….. The mathematics is neutral.
There’s a good quote that all folk interpreting data should bear in mind: “all models are wrong – but some models are useful” – which Google tells me comes from statistician George Box.
Before anyone uses any model, we should know the constraints of it. I like it that CERN scientists were able to say that if they hadn’t found evidence of the Higgs Boson by xxx then their model was wrong. That’s scientific.
PSR noted the problem of using so much maths in what is a social science (and we now rarely discuss that changing x will cause y to go up/down …) …. For some reason we talk about xyz has gone up by 0.1% without any consideration if this is significant (statistically). And we know, quoting arbitrary numbers to 4 decimal places is easy – knowing if they are statistically meaningful would take effort. Our superficial modellers and stenographers don’t do that and not criticised for their failing!
So “economics” seems caught in no-mans land of piss poor judgement and rigour: it doesn’t consider the limits of applicability of applicable constraints, limits of its models, significance/causation of any changes in outcomes and it fails to describe the expected impacts that government levers can effect. They are trying to make it seem “magic” whereas a true scientific endeavour would welcome increased clarity and understanding. But, meantime, don’t blame the maths!
Thanks
And a lot to agree with.
Richard/all,
Best wishes for this year to one and all.
There’s been some criticism about economics maths in the last few days … I’d like to defend maths! Maths has no axe to grind – though it can be mis-applied!
There’s a good quote (which Google tells me is attributed to George EP Box): “all models are wrong – some models can be useful”. Most folk are taught that models to explain basic phenomena may not be good enough for all cases (eg jiggling atoms aren’t really like little vibrating balls … But that can definitely be useful!).
I really liked it that CERN scientists were able to say that with this capability if they didn’t detect evidence of the Higg’s Boson by xyz, then their model was almost certainly wrong.
What do we have reported about the economy: something increased by 0.1% this month. Is that significant – probably not. What is the error in their reporting? What are the constraints of the models?
Is it easy to quote a model output to 4 decimal places – yes! Is it harder to know or calculate what the limits of the model is (given the numerous uncertainties – yes!). So our users and developers of the economic models or the economic stenographers don’t report that (it’s harder!). But this spurious accuracy appears confident!
I also note PSR lamented why there’s a fixation on using maths for economics – a social science. I think this comes down to seeking “credibility” when there is no scientific basis for it (ie test a hypothesis).
Instead, we miss out on the explanations of the balancing act of adjusting government levers to impact x, y or z. Now we report that dept y has spent z gbp on problem abc. Xyz has gone down by 0.1%.
Are these changes causal? Reasonable? Significant (statistically) …. Is the model used even valid? Let’s not write about that … Its hard!
Much to agree with
I like maths
My wife accuses me of talking in maths – and she has to tell me not to
It’s the faulure to understand maths and to see what it means that irritates me
We are in agreement
Might the conscious and/or unconscious choice/target of the “music” affect those who “compose and market the music”?
In other words, for whom is the “music” intended?
Might scientists, politicians, advertisers etc. have a conscious or unconscious set of choices which include the following?
1) Self and some others who seek truth/validity
2) Appealing to colleagues and fans who are in/support the current, dominant group and its connected fashions
3) Those who provide wealth and status in the forms of money, donations, career
opportunities etc.
4) The regular citizens and their children who experience the actual, practical consequences and costs of dominant/fashionable theories and their associated workings