“... too much on beating students to death with mathematics”?

Sorry, Herr Sinn, but what do you exactly mean with “mathematics”?

Many economists believe that mathematics is calculation, and making formal models based on calculations.

Mathematics can't be reduced to this little subset of it – mathematics is thinking, abstraction (neglecting irrelevant details) and building-up reasonable structures.

So, what actually happens is that economists make often use of real functions (“indicators”) using them as a measure, making temporal and spatial comparisons, neglecting any preventive check about if this real function is actually a measure, in the sense of the mathematics “theory of measure”.

So, they make often nonsensical deductions. Was first Poincaré who pointed out this issue to Mr. Walras ate the very beginning of XX century.

So, your phrase should be rephrased as “ … beating students to death with calculations”, which is – of course – a very bad habit. What lacks here is exactly mathematics, which cannot be reduced to calculations.

As to Adam Smith, his supposed concept of “invisible hand” not only it is hardly considered as always present by mainstream economists, but it can be hardly considered as used by Adam Smith himself in this sense.

Get a look at that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

And mainly to that:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_invisible

But a lot of classical liberals and neoliberal economists of any flavor do indeed ascribe to this verbal expression a meaning that it doesn't have at all. And they make so for political reasons, to defend a specific social arrangement or some vested interest. Just as an instance taken at random, the “soziale markwirthshaft” economics. Erhard, just for instance, and Von Mises and Von Hayeck, and the ordoliberals – a small set of former nazis who opposed to the left-wing of nazism, the SA, who asked for a “socialist” outcome of the Hitler government making some sort of capital socialization. That's was a very good thing for Hitler itself, who in 1933 killed SAs in order to not make any move in this direction.

So, as you do, I also believe that economics cannot be divided from politics. This doesn't nevertheless mean of course that one can think what he want, or what he need in order to support his political views.

Just for the saje of making an instance, one cannot believe for political reasons that austerity is a good way to restore economies. It is a good way indeed to make liquidity to flow back from indebted countries to creditor countries, that's correct. I'm talking about private debt, such as just for a very very abstract instance, when banks of a given country lend money to the banks of another because this can be made to a higher interest rate than the domestic one; then when a crisis follows, the indebted countries are unable to give back debt to the creditor' banks. In this case austerity in indebted countries is a good idea – at least apparently.

It can nevertheless suddenly turn to be a very bad idea, if this austerity go to the point of destroying the debtor economy, because a dead debtor – for major reasons, ask God about that - cannot give back his debt.

So, killing his own debtors is – generally speaking, just as an example – a very silly idea.

Austerity can thus be apparently a good idea to restore *creditor* economies, but only to a limited extent. I'm neglecting of course social and human outcomes of such idea - in the abstraction framework, they are negligible details, we are now making a strictly scientific reasoning, avoiding any slush.

And all that can be a consequence of a too much politically biased (better: wishful faith biased) economics.

Regards.