The first term of my master’s degree in economics was an alarming experience. The econometrics was bewildering. The macroeconomics was even more mysterious. Everything was drenched in incomprehensible mathematics — or, to be more honest, maths that I could not comprehend.

Most worrying of all was the microeconomics: this was a subject that had felt so natural and so enjoyable as an undergraduate, but now, it, too, had retreated into an austere stronghold of calculus. Some relief came with a lecture on Kenneth Arrow’s general possibility theorem, which relies on a different type of mathematics: formal logic.

Why had economists become so enamoured of mathematics — and was any of it useful?