"Stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men's urge for mathematical masturbation"

Here's Arnold Kling, in a blog post entitled "Economists with Pseudo-Knowledge", where he takes macroeconomists to task for pretending to know what the hell they're talking about. He hits on something I've been thinking since freshman macro – it's all bullshit:

My main beef with economists is that standard macroeconomics does such a poor job of describing what is going on. The textbooks models are pretty much useless. Where in the textbooks is "liquidity preference" a demand for Treasury securities? Where in the textbooks does it say that injecting capital into banks is a policy tool?

Graduate macro is even worse. Have the courses that use representative-agent models solving Euler equations been abolished? Have the professors teaching those courses been fired? Why not?

I have always thought that the issue of the relationship between financial markets and the "real economy" was really deep. I thought that it was a critical part of macroeconomic theory that was poorly developed. But the economics profession for the past thirty years instead focused on producing stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men's urge for mathematical masturbation.

Here is a post from this past summer where I take social scientists to task for their overuse of math.