Lars P. Syll

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The COVID-19 pandemic impelled governments to fall back on “fiscal Keynesianism,” because there was no way that just increasing the quantity of money could lead to the reopening of businesses that were prevented by law from doing so. Fiscal Keynesianism in the big lockdown meant issuing Treasury payments to people prevented from working. But now that the economy has reopened, the practical rationale for monetary and fiscal expansion has disappeared. Mainstream financial...

Farliga fubickar i foliehatt Med den pandemi vi befinner oss i idag är det här — världen över — den utan tvekan farligaste grupp av människor som traskar runt på vår planet. Ska vi få stopp på corona-epidemin måste politiker och beslutsfattare sluta dalta med dessa tickande pandemibomber. Om du inte vaccinerat dig har du inte på restauranger, barer, affärer, fotbollsarenor, popkoncerter, skolor och arbetsplatser att göra. Punkt slut!...

My moral compass (personal) This is the advice I’ve always given my sons and daughters when they’ve come and asked for guidance when confronted with momentous moral issues in life: Ask yourself — Can I do this and still like what I see in the mirror tomorrow when I wake up? That moral compass has served me well for almost half a century now, and I’m sure it has also helped my youngsters to become the good and honest people they are.

Veblen, Keynes, and Hirschman were more than economists because they practiced their economics from a standpoint outside the profession, using it to criticize not only the assumption of rational self-interest, but also the consequences of economists’ indifference to “preferences.” Veblen’s standpoint was explicitly religious; he was still of a believing generation. Keynes, too, was an ethicist. G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica remained what he called his “religion under the...

The experimentalist ‘revolution’ in economics What has always bothered me about the “experimentalist” school is the false sense of certainty it conveys. The basic idea is that if we have a “really good instrument” we can come up with “convincing” estimates of “causal effects” that are not “too sensitive to assumptions.” Elsewhere I have written  an extensive critique of this experimentalist perspective, arguing it presents a false panacea, andthat...

On wokeness and islamism .[embedded content]

A thousand kisses deep .[embedded content]

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The incorporation of new information makes sense only if the future is to be similar to the past. Any kind of empirical test, whatever form it adopts, will not make sense, however, if the world is uncertain because in such a world induction does not work. Past experience is not a useful guide to guess the future in these conditions (it only serves when the future, somehow, is already implicit in the present) … I believe the only way to use past experience is to assume that the...