A few years ago, back when I was working on my M.A., I attended an economics conference (for background, my training is as a historian). I had never seen an economic model before, and I had no idea of what to expect (for those who haven't seen one, it's a really long mathematical equation with up to dozens of variables).

The presentation that sticks with me, even to this day, was a presenter who was attempting to model whether revenge limits or increases violence in a conflict situation. After about seven variables, I was completely lost. I was also quite surprised when he declared that according to his equation, the possibility of revenge LIMITED violence. So, during the question period after the paper was presented, I pointed out that there was not, to my knowledge, a single moment in history where this was the case, and for that reason many societies (including the Vikings, which happens to be my favourite period of history) had implemented workarounds to limit revenge.

I learned two things from that conference - the first was there are economists who think they can model things accurately without checking their facts, and the second was that not everything can be reduced to mathematics.