Over at National Review, Larry Kudlow writes:

Larry Kudlow on Enron, Morals, and Adam Smith on National Review Online: Capitalism in this country has been under assault ever since FDR's New Deal 1930s, a time when a number of alphabet agencies attempted to control America's industrial and farming sectors. The experiment soon proved a dismal failure, with unemployment running 20 to 25 percent up until WWII...

Ummm... The implication that Roosevelt's New Deal pushed the unemployment rate up is, of course, false. The U.S. unemployment rate in the Great Depression peaked at 24.9% in 1933--before any of Roosevelt's policies had time to have any impact--and was below 20% by the end of 1935. By Pearl Harbor day the unemployment rate was 9%--still very disappointingly high, but a far cry from Kudlow's "The [New Deal] experiment... dismal failure... unemployment running 20 to 25 percent up until World War II."

It's too far out for the scientists, that science has causation backwards, but that's why they mistakenly think nature is a lifeless machine following the rules we find useful for causing things for ourselves. It makes a big difference in the kind of world we think we live in to see the unexpectedly pervasive role of local system evolution in natural behavior of all scales and kinds. There are also some other little mistakes lying around... and I haven't figured out how to make myself enough of a nuisance about it.

Some complex natural systems might be amenable to mathematical description, but surely not most.    What they’re more amenable to is story telling, which can be very usefully grounded in fact by directly reading the shapes of their evolutionary events, using the underlying ideas of calculus.   It’s just calculus reshaped a little for exploring things beyond mathematics in the new world.