Lars P. Syll

The alleged success of econometrics Econometricians typically hail the evolution of econometrics as a “big success”. For example, Geweke et al. (2006) argue that “econometrics has come a long way over a relatively short period” … Pagan (1987) describes econometrics as “outstanding success” because the work of econometric theorists has become “part of the process of economic investigation and the training of economists” … These claims represent no more than...

The concept of dynamics The concept of dynamics, which complements bourgeois “ahistoricity,” is raised to something absolute, while it nevertheless, as the anthropological reflex of the laws of production, must be critically confronted in the emancipated society with need. The idea of unfettered doing, of uninterrupted creating, of chubby-cheeked insatiability, of freedom as intense activity, feeds on the bourgeois concept of nature, which from time...

Central banks and fiscal policies Suppose a UK government became extremely irresponsible, and enacted large tax cuts during an economic boom. The Bank would, following its remit, attempt to put the lid on inflationary pressure by raising interest rates. Suppose further that the markets panicked, and refused to buy UK government debt except at ridiculously high interest rates. In that situation I think it is extremely unlikely that the Bank would intervene...

 [embedded content] Bille August’s and Ingmar Bergman’s marvellous​ masterpiece. With breathtakingly beautiful music by Stefan Nilsson.

Mainstream macroeconomics — rigorously irrelevant There is something about the way macroeconomists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretenses during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modeling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics would give way to...

Thus luxury is being hollowed out. For in the middle of general fungibility, happiness clings without exception to what is not fungible. No exertion of humanity, no formal reasoning can alter the fact that the clothing which shimmers like a fairy-tale is worn by the one and only, not by twenty-thousand others. Under capitalism, the utopia of the qualitative — what by virtue of its difference and uniqueness does not enter into the ruling exchange relationship — flees into the...

The compulsive types there correspond to the paranoids here. The wistful opposition to factual research, the legitimate consciousness that scientism forgets what is best, exacerbates through its naïvété the split from which it suffers. Instead of comprehending the facts, behind which others are barricaded, it hurriedly throws together whatever it can grab from them, rushing off to play so uncritically with apochryphal cognitions, with a couple isolated and hypostatized...

An interview with Stephanie Kelton Cody Fenwick: What drives the biggest misunderstandings about government debt in our national conversation? Everything is wrong. The way we talk about federal government debt is, from my perspective, we say things like we’re borrowing from China and foreigners. Hillary Clinton said when she was secretary of State that it’s a national security threat. People talk about it representing a liability to all of us, so we hear...

NAIRU — a non-existent unicorn In our extended NAIRU model, labor productivity growth is included in the wage bargaining process … The logical consequence of this broadening of the theoretical canvas has been that the NAIRU becomes endogenous itself and ceases to be an attractor — Milton Friedman’s natural, stable and timeless equilibrium point from which the system cannot permanently deviate. In our model, a deviation from the initial equilibrium affects...

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