I am stunned by Harold Meyerson’s column in today’s Washington Post. How can someone write a column on an issue he knows so little about?

Seriously:

The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago, is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything. Out of this belief arose the banks’ practice of securitization, which put a value on all manner of mortgages and enabled buyers to purchase and swap them with the certainty that such transactions reflected an accurate judgment of the value of the properties and the risks associated with them.

First, the Chicago school of economics in not the only free-market school of economics, nor is it the only school of economics that uses math. Has Mr. Meyerson ever traveled an economics conference and picked up the articles displayed by the presenters (free-market or not)? He will find so much math that his head will explode.

Oh and by the way, if I am not wrong, the economics literature that helped justify the passage of the massive stimulus bill back in February, rests on complicated math and multiplier effects. This literature is evidence that Mr. Meyerson has no clue what he is talking about. Or is Meyerson saying that Larry Summers, one of the leading neo-Keynesian economists working for the Obama administration, is a free-market economist? If that’s the case, then I am not sure what he means by free-market economists.

More importantly, has Mr. Meyerson ever read a serious academic article by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman? The man is a math wiz. Granted, he hasn’t written anything serious in a long time, but far from being a free-market economist, he is a good example of how the profession talks these days.

And finally, has Mr. Meyerson ever heard of the Austrian school of economics? Over the years, this school has produced many serious free-market economics who wrote extensively on the problem of using math to mimic the real world. As my colleague Don Boudreaux writes:

Perhaps the greatest free-market economist of the 20th century, F. A. Hayek, not only used almost no math in his own work, but he also literally wrote a book — “The Counter-Revolution of Science” (1952) — to warn economists of the severe limits of mathematics as a language for learning about, and discussing, a phenomenon as complex as a modern human economy.

Mr. Meyerson should read the Austrian Economists blog. Great economists such as Pete Boettke, Frederic Sautet, and Steven Horwitz make the case for freedom daily, with no math. He should also read their books and articles; all published in respected academics journals, without much math at all.

And by the way, all of these economists have claimed for years that we were heading for disaster.