Lars P. Syll

How to tame inflation .[embedded content]

Regeringen och Riksbanken hanterar inflationen fel Vad beror den ökande inflationen på? Max Jerneck (MJ): Den beror till stor del på ökade priser på energi och livsmedel, som orsakas av saker som hur elmarknaden är reglerad och torka samt kriget i Ukraina. Även priserna på möbler och andra varor, och grundläggande komponenter och insatsvaror som halvledare och stål spelar in. Under pandemin minskade efterfrågan på tjänster samtidigt som den snabbt ökade...

The Law of Demand Mainstream economics is usually considered to be very ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise.’ And yes, indeed, it’s certainly full of ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise’ statements like “the state of the economy will remain the same as long as it doesn’t change.” Although ‘true,’ this is, however — like most other analytical statements — neither particularly interesting nor informative. As is well known, the law of demand is usually tagged with a clause that...

Propensity scores — bias-reduction gone awry .[embedded content]

Hegel in 60 minuten .[embedded content]

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Mainstream economics — the art of building fantasy worlds Mainstream macroeconomic models standardly assume things like rational expectations, Walrasian market clearing, unique equilibria, time invariance, linear separability and homogeneity of both inputs/outputs and technology, infinitely lived intertemporally optimizing representative household/ consumer/producer agents with homothetic and identical preferences, etc., etc. At the same time, the models...

In other words, if a decision-maker thinks something cannot be true and interprets this to mean it has zero probability, he will never be influenced by any data, which is surely absurd. So leave a little probability for the moon being made of green cheese; it can be as small as 1 in a million, but have it there since otherwise an army of astronauts returning with samples of the said cheese will leave you unmoved. To get the Bayesian probability calculus going you sometimes...

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Evidence-based economics — the fundamentals Many economists still think that “evidence” is only of one kind, i.e. statistical/econometric analysis. Whilst this is important, it is not enough on its own. One reason for its privileged position may be that it is typically contrasted with “anecdotal evidence”, which is unreliable. But the truth is richer than that. It is true that basing one’s thinking about the economy on one or more stories carries the danger...