On a higher level, I believe that he speaks for most (if not all) social sciences and what happens when they cross mathematical models who blindly try to understand and predict the real world through a flawed, limited mathematical model.
If we can do this eventually, then perhaps we can make our way to models that capture a larger fraction of the truth and can be tested against reality.
Nonetheless, many of these models are still falsifiable. For example, the textbook model of the benefits of trade due to comparative advantage only contains two countries and two goods. Although extremely simplistic, the theory does have falsifiable predictions and there is good empirical evidence supporting the broad theory. But this simple model will not be able to accurately predict how much a particular country will benefit from free trade.
Even if you did have all of that data, you would still be missing a lot of data. For example, an important factor in economics is asymmetric information. An actor's decision may be optimal given the information available to them at the time even if the decision is suboptimal given perfect information. So for an even more accurate model, you would also need to have data on what each actor knows at any given point in time.
Furthermore, an actor probably does not have the ability to calculate the optimal outcome given the information available and there are innumerable subjective factors in economic decision making.
Big data will help you find some kind estimate, but it will not suddenly make economic modelling simple.
Anyone who uses the term "neoliberalism" is a charlatan. It is an absurd conspiracy theory that has since blown into an amorphous meme out of Marxist historiographers who struggle with the explanatory power (or lack thereof) of their framework.
Mathematical models do have their uses in formalizing assumptions and analyzing dependencies, so they're not all bad, even if the Cowles Commission did go overboard.
(Also let's not forget that the modern methodology of economics came as a result of the Keynesian research program, particularly since Hicks (1937)'s introduction of IS-LM, first modeled by Keynes himself in 1933 as four simultaneous equations.)
I don't think people who use the term think it refers specifically to shadowy cabal of free marketeers conspiring with each other over some hidden agenda. It's just a term for what a bunch of people, many of whom are in positions of power, happen to openly think and do.
No, its not. Its used by defenders of neoliberalism quite a bit.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2010/Sumnerneolibera...
https://cambridgedevelopmentstudies.wordpress.com/2011/04/12...
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31603
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=94...
> A lot of people describe themselves as libertarians of various types, or even as classical liberals, but I've never met a person calling herself a neoliberal.
Which says a lot more about who you do (and don't) know than it says about anything else.
But, even here it does not look well-defined at all: at best, authors simply classify specific policies as "neoliberal".
It is always used to critisize things from the left, which creates an impression that the term describes economically right-of-center ideologies, but that's IMO just because of the difference in vocabulary between different groups -- e.g. you may see the same thing described as neoliberal by the left, liberal by the right, and "statist" by the libertarians.
Thinking about it, "statist" is a similarly empty term used exclusively by opponents -- I've never seen anyone calling herself a "statist" either.
> It is an absurd conspiracy theory that has since blown into an amorphous meme out of Marxist historiographers who struggle with the explanatory power (or lack thereof) of their framework.
"neoliberalism" as a term is no more (and, arguably, much less) an invention of Marxist historiography than is "capitalism"; its true that both terms were coined by critics of the systems they describe, but that's not uncommon.
When I've heard him speak, he attacks overly simplistic mathematical models which badly fit complex real world behaviour.
If Chomsky's generative grammar provided a better model of language, Google translate would be running of that rather than statistical models.
Chomsky's ideas don't explain the butterflies. In the same way Varoufakis targets theory led economics which don't explain recent events.
Stats led models take the opposite approach, explaining the butterflies very well. The trade off is decreased ability to act in novel situations.
Chomskian grammars (CFGs) are used widely in compilers and similar tools to model computer languages and even for limited subsets of natural language they don't do half bad.
The problem with phrase structure grammars is that they're very costly to develop and maintain and so far there's never been one such grammar that can model the whole of a natural language.
If there was a way to learn CFGs with good coverage from text they'd be in much wider use, but unfortunately grammar induction is hard.
Also, Google has its own political reasons not to want to use grammars. They champion neural networks and statistical AI. It's their schtick, innit.