This is the brief talk I gave at a conference celebrating 25 years of the Critical Realist seminar series at Cambridge University. Critical realists argue against the use of mathematics in economics; I argue here that it’s the abuse of mathematics by Neoclassical economists–who practice what I have dubbed “Mythematics” rather than Mathematics–and that some phenomena are uncovered by mathematical logic that can’t be discovered by verbal logic alone. I give the example of my own model of Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis, which revealed the possibility of a “Great Moderation” preceding a “Great Recession” before either event had happened.
