Lars P. Syll

Revealed preference theory — much ado about almost nothing Twenty-seven years ago yours truly wrote an article on revealed preference theory that got published in History of Political Economy (no. 25, 1993). Paul Samuelson wrote a kind letter and informed me that he was the one who had recommended it for publication. But although he liked a lot in it, he also wrote a comment — published in the same volume of HOPE — saying: Between 1938 and 1947, and since...

Game theory — theory with little substantive content I don’t see that we are even entitled to assume that reality accords to some model that humans are able to envisage … To say that Pandora knows what decision model she is facing can therefore be taken as meaning no more than that she is committed to proceeding as though her model were true … The price of abandoning psychology for revealed-preference theory is therefore high. We have to give up any...

Freier Kapitalverkehr und Freihandel Das letzte Mal, dass die USA einen Außenhandels-überschuss erzielten, war im Jahr 1980. Seitdem wies das Land massive Defizite auf. Im November 2016 war die Zahl der Amerikaner, die sich zusammen mit anderen Gruppen als Verlierer des Freihandels betrachteten, groß genug, um Trump zum Präsidenten zu wählen. Das bedeutet, dass das von den USA angeführte Freihandelsregime, das der Menschheit seit 1945 beispiellosen...

The value of uncertainty What is the evolutionary utility of the predictive strategy if it allows our models to remain so persistently disconnected from our external situation? To fully understand the self-reinforcing power of such habits, we need to look once more beyond the brain. We need to attend to how the process of acting to minimise surprise ensnares our environment into the overarching error-minimising process. At the simplest level, such actions...

Cauchy logic in economics (wonkish) What is 0.999 …, really? It appears to refer to a kind of sum: .9 + + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 + … But what does that mean? That pesky ellipsis is the real problem. There can be no controversy about what it means to add up two, or three, or a hundred numbers. But infinitely many? That’s a different story. In the real world, you can never have infinitely many heaps. What’s the numerical value of an infinite sum? It doesn’t...

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Game theory — a severe case of Model Platonism The critic may respond that the game theorist’s victory in the debate is at best Pyrrhic, since it is bought at the cost of reducing the propositions of game theory to the status of ‘mere’ tautologies. But such an accusation disturbs the game theorist not in the least. There is nothing a game theorist would like better than for his propositions to be entitled to the status of tautologies, just like proper...

Why game theory fails to live up to its promise Why, it might be objected, should the goal of social science be mere causal explanations of particular events? Isn’t such an attitude more the province of the historian? Social science should instead be concentrating on systematic knowledge. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, this objection concludes, is a laudable example of exactly that – a piece of theory that sheds light over many different cases. In reply, we...

“Je schlechter es Deutschland geht, desto besser für die AfD” Dass sich der Pressesprecher einer Bundestagsfraktion mit einer Journalistin in einer Bar verabredet, um ein offenes und vertrauliches Gespräch zu führen, ist Alltag im Berliner Regierungsviertel. Aber das Abendessen, zu dem sich Christian Lüth, der damalige Sprecher der AfD-Fraktion, und die rechtslastige YouTuberin Lisa Licentia am 23. Februar 2020 in der Newton Bar in Berlin-Mitte treffen,...

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