Lars P. Syll

Anything we can actually do, we can afford Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income … Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can...

The methods economists bring to their research There are other sleights of hand that cause economists problems. In their quest for statistical “identification” of a causal effect, economists often have to resort to techniques that answer either a narrower or a somewhat different version of the question that motivated the research. Results from randomized social experiments carried out in particular regions of, say, India or Kenya may not apply to other...

.[embedded content] Einer der grundlegenden Denkfehler in der heutigen Diskussion über Staatsverschuldung und Haushaltsdefizite ist, dass man nicht zwischen verschiedenen Arten von Schulden unterscheidet. Auch wenn es auf makroökonomischer Ebene zwangsläufig so ist, dass Schulden und Vermögen einander ausgleichen, ist es keineswegs unerheblich, wer die Vermögen besitzt und wer die Schulden trägt. Lange Zeit war man zurückhaltend, die öffentlichen Schulden zu...

Why most economists don’t know what they’re doing As a subject, economics seems to have a fear and disgust of thinking about philosophy and methodology that might be described as Freudian. While other social scientists’ obsession with minute discussions of their methods and rhetoric, standards of proof and what they hope to achieve might be thought of as pathological in another way, the economists’ determination to sideline methodological discussion has...

Sahra Wagenknecht — a pro-Russian Leninist Wagenknechts Verteidigung der russischen Diktatur entspringt nicht nur den üblichen antiwestlichen Reflexen. Ihre vergifteten Forderungen nach einem vermeintlichen Frieden durch Unterwerfung sind nicht nur Ausdruck ihrer antifreiheitlichen Vorstellungen. Beides hängt eng mit ihrer ideologischen Nähe zum russischen autoritären Staat unter Putin zusammen. Das strategische Kalkül besteht darin, Russland als...

At a first glance, DSGE models seem to imply total ignorance because representative agents (or representative groups of agents with limited heterogeneity) featuring objective utility functions populate the literature. At a second glance, however, it becomes obvious that “methodological individualism” prevails and even dominates. To understand this dominance one only has to once again note that the representative agent has fixed properties only within any given model, or paper....

“New Keynesian” DSGE models To be fair to academia, it has realized that the pure DSGE model is incapable of explaining observable phenomena so they have introduced numerous amendments, known, oddly, as “imperfections” in the model. Long-term nominal contracts, other labour market frictions, imperfection in credit markets, all these and more are prayed in aid and, either rigorously or more usually ad hoc, introduced into the model, generating lags that...

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Deirdre McCloskey’s shallow and misleading rhetoric This is not new to most of you of course. You are already steeped in McCloskey’s Rhetoric. Or you ought to be. After all economists are simply telling stories about the economy. Sometimes we are taken in. Sometimes we are not. Unfortunately McCloskey herself gets a little too caught up in her stories. As in her explanation as to how she can be both a feminist and a free market economist: “The market is the...