Lars P. Syll

Trump — un bouffon sous kétamine .[embedded content]

What does concern me about my discipline, however, is that its current core — by which I mainly mean the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach — has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the precision that it has about the real one … The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium strategy is so attractive, and even plain addictive, because it allows one to generate...

Trying to explain tariff incidence to MAGA supporters .[embedded content]

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Tyskland lättar på skuldbromsen — och Sverige bör följa efter! .[embedded content] I Tyskland har den så kallade Schuldenbremse (skuldbromsen) varit en central del av den ekonomiska politiken sedan år 2009. Regeln begränsar hur mycket staten får låna, med syftet att hålla den offentliga skulden låg. Kruxet med regeln har dock varit uppenbar — den hindrar nödvändiga investeringar i infrastruktur, grön omställning och välfärd. Sverige har med sitt på senare...

How economists forgot the real world The book’s argument is that in straining to peer through the chaos and confusion of the world to the underlying mechanisms, too much economic thinking, both in Ricardo’s day and ours, mistook a small, unrepresentative sample as the whole picture. This has distorted the vision of generations. If your scientific ideal is a simple, logical model, there is a tendency to focus on those parts of reality that are more regular...

The Envelope Theorem (student stuff) .[embedded content]

I am in a grim and introspective mood this morning. I have been reflecting on how my father might react to where we are. He was one of those who fought against fascism. His life was shortened by being wounded during that fight. As a result, I never knew him as a healthy person. What, I wonder, would he make of America’s turn away from democracy and towards autocracy? What would he make of the pillaging of Ukraine’s resources as payment for so-called “aid” given by America in...

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The relation of knowledge to power is one not only of servility but of truth. Much knowledge, if out of pro­portion to the disposition of forces, is invalid, however formally correct it may be.If an émigré doctor says: ‘For me … is a patological case’, his pronouncement may ultimately be con­firmed by clinical findings, but its incongruity with the objective calamity visited on the world in the name of that paranoiac renders the diagnosis ridiculous, mere professional...