ABSTRACT
For more than a century, there has been tension between those in economics who would make the field more mathematical and those who believe that is a problem. Veblen advocated a non-mathematical approach to economics while Peirce thought economics would become highly mathematical even from an evolutionary perspective. This chapter explores the critiques and counter-critiques of the empirical methods of economics. Economics has become a mathematically rich social science. Besides econometrics, the major line of mathematics in economics is mathematical economic theory as found in most areas of microeconomics and especially in general equilibrium theory in macroeconomics. One of the most recent domains of research in economics that seems to have suffered a sharp empirical setback is macroeconomics.
