According to Romer, some researchers use unrealistic assumptions and strained interpretations of their results in order to push an ideological agenda, and use a smokescreen of fancy mathematics to disguise their intentions.
Perhaps our norms will soon be like those in professional magic; it will be impolite, perhaps even an ethical breach, to reveal how someone’s trick works.He specifically points to some work by Edward C. Prescott, Robert Lucas, Jr., and Ellen McGrattan, among others,[2] and argues for a return to scientific rigor: Economists have a collective stake in flushing mathiness out into the open.
Justin Fox notes that, in his book Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard Thaler documented how economists ignored real world phenomena because they did not fit into mainstream mathematical models.
[7] J. Bradford DeLong argued that mathiness means "restricting your microfoundations in advance to guarantee a particular political result and hiding what you are doing in a blizzard of irrelevant and ungrounded algebra".
[8] Paul Krugman thinks that the debate about drawing macroeconomic conclusions from the Great Recession is obstructed by the fact that there are economists, and whole departments that remain wholly dominated by mathiness.