Mandelbrot’s Economics After a Quarter Century

A quarter century has passed since the bulk of Benoit Mandelbrot’s articles on economics were published. This paper outlines the broad reactions to Mandelbrot’s theses within the economics profession. There are two separate literatures which have responded skeptically to his innovations: that which considers the empirical possibility that economic time series are best described as stochastic processes based upon Levy stable distributions; and that which considers the possible evidence for chaotic dynamics in economic time series. The paper concludes that much of the skepticism in orthodox economics is founded upon inadequate empirical premises, especially when compared to the approach of physicists to similar issues.