Lars P. Syll

Studying economics — a total waste of time One may perhaps, distinguish between obscure writers and obscurantist writers. The former aim at truth, but do not respect the norms for arriving at truth, such as focusing on causality, acting as the Devil’s Advocate, and generating falsifiable hypotheses. The latter do not aim at truth, and often scorn the very idea that there is such a thing as the truth … These writings have in common a somewhat uncanny...

Economics education needs a revolution You ask me what all idiosyncrasy is in philosophers? … For instance their lack of the historical sense, their hatred even of the idea of Becoming, their Egyptianism. They imagine that they do honour to a thing by divorcing it from history sub specie æterni—when they make a mummy of it. Friedrich Nietzsche Nowadays there is almost no place whatsoever in economics education for courses in the history of economic...

Time on my hands . [embedded content]

Inference to the best explanation One of the few statisticians that I have on my blogroll is Andrew Gelman.  Although not sharing his Bayesian leanings, yours truly finds  his open-minded, thought-provoking and non-dogmatic statistical thinking highly recommendable. The plaidoyer infra for  “reverse causal questioning” is typical Gelmanian: When statistical and econometrc methodologists write about causal inference, they generally focus on forward causal...

Wage rigidities and men in yellow hats It seems reasonable to hope that a successful explanation of wage rigidity would contribute to understanding the extent of the welfare loss associated with unemployment and what can be done to reduce it … Many theories of wage rigidity and unemployment include partial answers to these questions as part of their assumptions, so that the phenomena of real interest are described in the theories’ assumptions. For...

Modern macroeconomics — theory based on misleading illusions Standard new Keynesian macroeconomics essentially abstracts away from most of what is important in macroeconomics. To an even greater extent, this is true of the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that are the workhorse of central bank staffs and much practically oriented academic work. Why? New Keynesian models imply that stabilization policies cannot affect the average level of...

Economics — an egregious case of theory denialism . [embedded content] Using formal mathematical modelling, mainstream economists sure can guarantee that the conclusions hold given the assumptions. However the validity we get in abstract model-worlds does not warrantly transfer to real-world economies. Validity may be good, but it isn’t — as Nancy Cartwright so eloquently argues — enough. From a realist perspective, both relevance and soundness are sine qua...

While one can understand that some of the elements in DSGE models seem to appeal to Keynesians at first sight, after closer examination, these models are in fundamental contradiction to Post-Keynesian and even traditional Keynesian thinking. The DSGE model is a model in which output is determined in the labour market as in New Classical models and in which aggregate demand plays only a very secondary role, even in the short run. In addition, given the fundamental philosophical...

Adorno und Horkheimer über die verwaltete Welt . [embedded content]

Robert Boyer sur le capitalisme et la pandémie Pour qualifier la crise que nous traversons, les économistes oscillent entre « crise sans précédent », « récession la plus grave depuis 1929 », ou encore « troisième crise du siècle » – après celles des subprimes de 2008 et de l’euro en 2010. Qu’en pensez-vous ? Le terme de « récession » s’applique au moment où un cycle économique, arrivé à une certaine étape, se retourne pour des raisons endogènes – ce qui...