Lars P. Syll

.[embedded content] Vangelis (1943-2022). Thanks for all the great music that brought us to eternity and beyond. RIP

Axel Leijonhufvud In Memoriam   I first came across Axel’s writing as an undergraduate student at Manchester University where we were taught from his doctoral dissertation, Keynes and the Keynesians; a book that shot Axel to intellectual rock stardom. He argued in that book that Keynes’ General Theory had nothing to do with sticky wages and prices but was instead about inter-temporal coordination failure … Although Axel recognized the importance...

It is now widely recognised that observation is not theory-neutral but theory-laden, and that theory does not merely ‘order facts’ but makes claims about the nature of its object. So, in evaluating observations we are also assessing particular theoretical concepts and existential claims. A common response to this shattering of innocent beliefs in the certainty and neutrality of observation has been the development of idealist (especially conventionalist and rationalist)...

… yours truly always visits Walter-Benjamin-Platz (close to Kurfürstendamm, between Leibnizstraße and Wielandstraße). Interesting architecture and a couple of excellent restaurants and cafés.

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The orthodox Keynesianism of the time did have a theoretical explanation for recessions and depressions. Proponents saw the economy as a self-regulating machine in which individual decisions typically lead to a situation of full employment and healthy growth. The primary reason for periods of recession and depression was because wages did not fall quickly enough. If wages could fall rapidly and extensively enough, then the economy would absorb the unemployed. Orthodox...

Bertrand Russell on the folly of religious faith .[embedded content] Faith should not be a question of believing in eternity, but rather of how to live our finite lives together and be true to our belief in the pursuit of authentic freedom.

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What guarantee is there … that economic concepts can be mapped unambiguously into mathematical concepts? The belief in the power and necessity of formalizing economic theory mathematically has thus obliterated the distinction between cognitively perceiving and understanding concepts from different domains and mapping them into each other. Whether the age-old problem of the equality between supply and demand should be mathematically formalized as a system of inequalities or...