Lars P. Syll

.                                                                                                                             [embedded content] Adorno knew Trump was coming …

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Who lights the stars? Thirty-one years ago. A newly wedded couple celebrating in front of the church in Jönköping where the act took place. People say time heals all wounds. I wish that was true. But some wounds never heal. Even after twenty-seven years you just have to learn to live with the scars. In memory of Kristina Syll — beloved wife and mother of David and Tora. [embedded content]

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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...