Lars P. Syll

… 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...

Touring again. Guest appearance​​ in Berlin. Regular blogging to be resumed next week.

Gödel and the limits of mathematics .[embedded content] Gödel’s incompleteness theorems raise important questions about the foundations of mathematics. The most important concern is the question of how to select the specific systems of axioms that mathematics is supposed to be founded on. Gödel’s theorems irrevocably show that no matter what system is chosen, there will always have to be other axioms to prove previously unproven truths. This, of course,...

Tid är en bristvara i tv. Om man likväl ––som så ofta nu för tiden — använder dyrbar sändningstid till struntsaker och menlös ”underhållning” måste det finnas ett skäl. Televisionen är — fortfarande — för en stor del av befolkningen en viktig källa till information och världsbild. Att fylla ut programtablåer med trivialiteter blir därför ett effektivt medel att — istället för att fungera som ett effektivt instrument för åsiktsbildning och reflektion — tränga undan viktig...