Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Newtonian time in economics

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was NO CONSENSUS. postdlf (talk) 15:34, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Newtonian time in economics[edit]

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Long-term unimproved article that is badly referenced, downright confusing, and perhaps WP:FRINGE? Was tagged for speedy-G1 by an IP, but given the age of the article I believe AfD is the better course, so here we are. The Bushranger _{One ping only} 03:34, 28 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Time - I've read this article 3 or 4 times and it seems like gibberish. Maybe the topic is notable, but this article is unintelligible. --GrapedApe (talk) 04:06, 28 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete If it's worth redirecting, it's worth deleting per CSD R3, and it's worth deleting as fringe and for lack of reliable sources. --Selket ^Talk 10:05, 28 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Business-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:33, 28 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Social science-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:34, 28 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment It is a concrete example of physics envy. Some books [1] and papers [2] on the subject. ^walk victor falk^talk 19:58, 28 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. -- Danger (talk) 15:58, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - appears to be a relatively frequently concept discussed in economics per victor falk. For what it's worth, the article makes some sense if one is very familiar with the concepts it's referencing, but I can definitely see how it looks like gibberish. (It's always so adorable when economists try to do physics.) --Danger (talk) 16:03, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep It needs work but the topic seems notable - see What Is So Austrian about Austrian Economics?, for example. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:12, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. While possibly a fringe theory, it appears to be a notable one to judge from these Google Scholar and Books searches, so rather than deleting, it needs improving to include criticisms of the idea or the terminology (e.g. from the 'strongly negative' review of the book in The Review of Austrian Economics doi:10.1007/BF01539340: "It would have been better, I think, to refer to the static uses of time as "neoclassical time" rather than "Newtonian time;' for the latter suggests that more is at stake than the misuse of time in economic analysis. But that is a quibble. The last subsection of their discussion of Newtonian time, "The Measurement of Time" (pp. 58-59), is dressed up in mathematical garb and is very difficult to understand;" (p195)). Personally I have serious doubts about including the article in the 'Time topics' navbox though, especially in its present state. Qwfp (talk) 19:46, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete?? Or perhaps make clear that this needs a complete re-write (by an expert???). Having looked at some of the references linked from this AfD I am simply dumbfounded. This concept seems to be a bizarre false analogy used by unintelligible philosopher/economists. It clearly belongs in some category like generalized theoretical pseudo-economics. I shall go away and try to search for "relativistic einsteinian time in economics". Dingo1729 (talk) 19:22, 2 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Adequate notability not established. Xxanthippe (talk) 10:55, 6 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]
Keep Clear enough there is references to this out there, regardless of peoples personal opinions to it. Mathmo ^Talk 20:09, 7 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, regardless of its notability etc., as completely incomprehensible to the educated lay reader. If this is a notable topic, it needs a complete rewrite so as to be understandable. Sandstein 06:51, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - I don't pretend to understand the subject, and Sandstein and others are right about the article's issues, but the topic appears notable and has refs, so I would rather err on the side of caution. Jus da fax 07:44, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, — Coffee // have a cup // essay // 04:43, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. This article is BS barely supported by the sources cited. Perhaps it was not intended that way, but that's what it reads like. It's entirely based on one source, a book which has very bad reviews, e.g. [3] (Words stemming from "confusion", "bewilder", and "mislead" abound in this review.) Further, most of the wikilinks are wrong, because as it's amply explained in that review, O'Driscoll & Rizzo do not use real time and similar concepts in any standard sense, but have their own implied definitions. E.g. "Remember, the authors' whole idea of "real time" is that the present is connected to the past by memory and to the future by anticipation." This is contrasted to "static (or Newtonian)" time by which they mean "time treated as an independent mathematical variable". And if that's not enough, they don't even define their counter-theory: "There is nothing in von Mises that says that decision making is preordained or predetermined by what went before. So what is "dynamic subjectivism"? No clear answer can be found in chapter 2, or in the rest of the book. The confusion does not stop there." Perhaps a NPOV article on the book may be worthwhile, making this notion (if we can call it that) a redirect. But extracting the snippets of that book in an article written in "Wikipedia's voice", never mind the unsupported introductory stuff (because it misses the codebook needed to parse the rest) is really promotional of crap squared (how's that for Maths envy?) or plain gibberish. Tijfo098 (talk) 01:28, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: I wrote some of the above in the article as well, so that someone reading it at least gets some info WTF it's about, but I still think we shouldn't have this article in Wikipedia. There really isn't anything of substance said in the article about "Newtonian time in economics", but it's rather a giant WP:COATRACK of an alternative (and poorly defined) theory of "real time", as defined/explained above. Tijfo098 (talk) 04:26, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, per WP:WP is not bullshit, a weaker version of the policy that WP should follow the best most reliable sources, not the weirdest academics able to publish. (Following a comment at my talk page) Kiefer.Wolfowitz (Discussion) 16:10, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Non-notable fringe theory, with a badly-written and almost unreadable article. Big Dom 16:42, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Fringe, incoherent, and most importantly, non-notable (has no acceptance in economics aside from the original authors). —Lowellian (reply) 00:36, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Appears to me to be a neologism based on a single book. -- P 1 9 9 • TALK 02:47, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. A simple search finds many sources, here =>[4][5] are two. The fact that the first reference cites a book about this and the Cambridge controversy allows me to logically conclude its importance. I will try to edit article in an attempt to invalidate the AfD nomination claims tomorrow. Why do people not put more effort into attempting to bring articles up to standard rather than deleting them, if an article is tagged AfD should this not be the last resort rather than a quick and dirty method to clean up Wikipedia? E2daipi (talk) 05:01, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Your second link [6] is an automatically-generated page from some sort of news search engine / aggregator, and NONE of the content it turns up actually deals with the subject in question. I could type anything into that aggregator and turn up something; for example, if I type in the random nonsensical phrase "perilous times in three ducks" then I get [7], which does not prove "perilous times in three ducks" to be notable. And your first source [8] is an offering on Amazon, a 30-page manuscript, little more than a single paper, from an unknown publisher, from a small retailer (it's not even directly sold by Amazon.com, and anyone can put up any random pamphlet up for sale on Amazon.com), with no author given -- for all we know, the author is the originator of this fringe theory. Your first source is unreliable, and your second source is not even a real source. —Lowellian (reply) 16:49, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.