After a night of sleep I'd say that Jenkins justifies his own preferences by concluding there is no honest 'mathematician' he can approach. So he can make do with the ones he likes personally.

This is a major crackpot indicator. The syllogism goes roughly like this:

1. Establish that the only evidence which counts is that produced by people who have no vested interest in the outcome whatsoever. (Or some other arbitrary unachievable standard that you would never apply to any other area of your life - two particular favourites of mine are "science doesn't know everything" and "but conventional medicine can't cure cancer either.*")
   
2. Establish that no evidence presented meets your perfect Platonic ideal form of Evidence^TM. (Surprise, surprise...)
   
3. Having thus thrown out all the evidence, pick whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

You see this technique employed all the time by anti-vaccination crackpots, libertarians, global warming deniers and similar such shills.

- Jake

*What makes it this fallacy rather than the tu quoque fallacy is that scientific medicine is actually quite good at curing many sorts of cancer. So the fallacy amounts to insisting that until science can cure all cancers, you should choose old wives' tales over effective medicine.

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.