Krugman figures it right

From Doing the Math:

Wonkblog links to a lovely piece by E.O. Wilson on how much math you need to do research. Wilson’s answer is, not much; and I agree...

But the intuition is crucial, and not just for writing academic papers. If you’re going to talk about economics at all, you need some sense of how magnitudes play off against each other, which is the only way to have a chance of seeing how the pieces fit together... Or maybe the thing to say is that higher math isn’t usually essential; arithmetic is.

I'm there, buddy.