"Although Ellenberg doesn't make this case explicitly, there's an argument to be made that the brand of mathematical thinking he's embracing overlaps heavily with a broadly liberal style of thinking about politics and the world."
No truer words were ever written, although not in the way this writer thinks. Ellenberg offers no empirical support for his hypothesis that prosperity versus "Swedishness" is nonlinear. The US experience offers confirmation that it is linear. Its best economic performance came during the Industrial Revolution (in terms of GDP and income growth), which is also the point that the US economy was freest. Other examples of outstanding economic performance under low tax and low regulation regimes are West Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong after World War II. Examples of economic decline after increased governmental involvement in the economy, including higher taxes and more regulation, are legion. Sweden itself has backed away from its own "Swedishness" the last few years as its economy sputtered.
Mathematical thinking is one facet of logical thinking, which requires looking at the evidence. Ellenberg simply makes an assertion of nonlinearity without citing supporting evidence and calls it mathematical thinking, which it is not. However, assertions without evidence are a hallmark of modern liberals (gun control reduces crime, redistribution reduces poverty, regulation benefits "consumers" and so on), so Ellenberg's "mathetical thinking" is indeed "a broadly liberal style of thinking."

The point I was trying to hammer into their "open minded" brains (which is funny because they refused to consider, or be open minded to my premise) was that economics do not determine what is moral and that therefore one cannot use the "curve" to plot the mix of statism versus liberty should they wish to determine the best course of action for an economy. Sadly subjectivism rules the day and the concept of the "ends justifying the means" is well baked into the brains of the collectivist mind (or lack thereof).

Notice the triangle in the photo. It does not exist. The sum of the 3 angles will always equal 180 degrees. Did the author fail geometry?

No, it's not liberal.

There's no way that an academic subject couched in logic and reason could be liberal. There are no naunces in math - it is concrete, eternal, and unchanging.

What a totality of Bullcrap. Nonsense into any logic system will output nonsense.

Ha. Great analogy. I especially appreciated the navel gazing towards the end. What do you expect from the " mother "? I'm interested in reading his critique of the Laffer Curve

The unending sets of experimentation that central planners everywhere have been scheming with is, how much violation of individual rights does it take to force a utopia of equality and fairness for all individuals?
They even look to numerous forms of matching other people's lives to simplified math problems to get their results to set up their next sets of human experimentation.

There was even a positive book review in WSJ by a physicist. huh. On his take that prosperity to welfare state is non-linear, really a type of Laffer curve, this is easily debunked by objective data on economic growth and prosperity. Even if govt spending was down to levels of 15%, growth continued to increase in any country. Here is a link to the study on db's blog:
http://hallingblog.com/austerity-why-it-...