There’s nothing wrong with math, per se, but like Paris Hilton at a religious retreat there are places where it simply doesn’t belong. For one example, the biggest detriment to America’s economic profession – to our understanding of economics, period – is how the Mathletes have taken over the field. Now, they have spread to even more insane endeavors.

Apparently, the Mathletes have bamboozled the Pentagon into giving them God knows how much taxpayer money to write…here it comes…”computer models that are supposed to forecast political unrest”. By the use of standard deviations and t-scores and coefficients, they promised, simply enter a few variables, push a button, and one could predict which countries would soon experience rebellion.

So how’s that working out? About as well as the Fed’s mathematical software has . We have far too much respect for math in this country, it’s practically a cult.