Lars P. Syll

John von Neumann on mathematics

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Berkson’s paradox (student stuff) .[embedded content]

How economic orthodoxy protects its dominant position John Bryan Davis (2016) has offered a persuasive account of the way an economic orthodoxy protects its dominant position. Traditional ‘reflexive domains’ for judging research quality — the theory-evidence nexus, the history and philosophy of economics — are pushed aside. Instead, research quality is assessed through journal ranking systems. This is highly biased towards the status quo and reinforces...

Les 150 ans de la Commune de Paris .[embedded content]

What’s wrong with economics? This is an important and fundamentally correct critique of the core methodology of economics: individualistic; analytical; ahistorical; asocial; and apolitical. What economics understands is important. What it ignores is, alas, equally important. As Skidelsky, famous as the biographer of Keynes, notes, “to maintain that market competition is a self-sufficient ordering principle is wrong. Markets are embedded in political...

Modell och verklighet i ekonomisk teori If orthodox economics is at fault, the error is to be found not in the super-structure, which has been erected with great care for logical consistency, but in a lack of clearness and of generality in the premisses. John Maynard Keynes Ekonomistudenter frågar ofta vad de ska med nationalekonomin till. Vad är poängen med att lära sig en massa matematisk-statistiska modeller när de uppenbarligen ändå inte hjälper oss...

Bayesianism — a wrong-headed pseudoscience The occurrence of unknown prior probabilities, that must be stipulated arbitrarily, does not worry the Bayesian anymore than God’s inscrutable designs worry the theologian. Thus Lindley (1976), one of the leaders of the Bayesian school, holds that this difficulty has been ‘grossly exaggerated’. And he adds: ‘I am often asked if the [Bayesian] method gives the right answer: or, more particularly, how do you know if...

On the poverty of deductivism In mainstream macroeconomics, there has for long been an insistence on formalistic (mathematical) modelling, and to some economic methodologists (e.g. Lawson 2015, Syll 2016) this has forced economists to give up on realism and substitute axiomatics for real world relevance. According to the critique, the deductivist orientation has been the main reason behind the difficulty that mainstream economics has had in terms of...

Mainstream economics — a severe case of Bourbaki perversion Il y a une certaine tendance française à attribuer à l’utilisation des mathématiques les difficultés des modèles à expliquer les phénomènes économiques … Pour moi, le problème ne réside pas dans l’utilisation des méthodes formelles mais plutôt dans une obsession poussant à améliorer et même à perfectionner des modèles qui semblent être totalement détachés de la réalité. Comme Robert Solow l’a...