> But Chicago is just the opposite. It's been criticized for being too tied up in the mathematics of it all. Chicagoans love numbers.
Empiricism often uses numbers and math, to be sure, but love of numbers and math is not love of empiricism: you can use math to tease out implications of your abstract, first-principles, non-empirical model as well as you can use apply it to real world observation in an attempt to confirm or refute an empirical model.
A criticism I've seen of the Chicago school has certainly been that it is more concerned with the mathematical implications of idealized assumptions and less concerned with how well those implications reflect real-world results.
Empiricism often uses numbers and math, to be sure, but love of numbers and math is not love of empiricism: you can use math to tease out implications of your abstract, first-principles, non-empirical model as well as you can use apply it to real world observation in an attempt to confirm or refute an empirical model.
A criticism I've seen of the Chicago school has certainly been that it is more concerned with the mathematical implications of idealized assumptions and less concerned with how well those implications reflect real-world results.