As a 40 year old Latin American guy, I have many leftist friends. I myself used to be one of them - but then I grew up and stopped denying the historical facts. In Brazil, if they want to offend you, they'll call you "neo-liberal". In fact, Liberalism has never reached that poor part of the planet, always under authoritarian regimes. Yes, recently we could breathe some democratic air due to some efforts of becoming Brazil an open and more liberal country. They all used to blame the "imperialism" (which means US) for all our own ills; most of them are Marxists without having read one single line of “Das Kapital”.
The Latin American leftist economists criticize the mainstream economic theory - which they blame for the current financial crisis, and also for the “climate change” (whatever this means) and for all national Brazilian soccer team fails. They are all biased and ideological economists. “Modeling” is a bad word in their vocabulary; “mathematical model” is just a way of covering the real problems of the economy; mainstream economists are all bad people interested in just using numbers and statistics to fool man in the street.
Epistemologically speaking, they argue mathematics cannot be used to solve the real economic problems. What they don’t know is that the same argument was largely used against the founders of physics in 15th and 16th Century. Even in US some prominent leftist economists haven’t resisted to the anti-mathematical call. The message seems to be: more (mathematical) knowledge is worse than remain in ignorance.
Well folks, this prologue is just to suggest a book that really presents a serious critics of economics as a “science” – The Rhetoric of Economics, by Deirdre McCloskey. Yet I think it’s kind of too relativistic.
