Lars P. Syll

Soon after joining the Budget Committee, Kelton the deficit owl played a game with the staffers. She would first ask if they would wave a magic wand that had the power to eliminate the national debt. They all said yes. Then Kelton would ask, “Suppose that wand had the power to rid the world of US Treasuries. Would you wave it?” This question—even though it was equivalent to asking to wipe out the national debt—“drew puzzled looks, furrowed brows, and pensive expressions....

The rhetoric of imaginary populations The most expedient population and data generation model to adopt is one in which the population is regarded as a realization of an infinite super population. This setup is the standard perspective in mathematical statistics, in which random variables are assumed to exist with fixed moments for an uncountable and unspecified universe of events … This perspective is tantamount to assuming a population machine that spawns...

Till det som är tabubelagt i Sverige hör att säga att statens pengar kommer från staten. När finanspolitiken nu expanderar under pandemin har man på ledarsidor kunnat läsa filosofiska resonemang om att de nya pengarna egentligen kommer från skattebetalarna, löntagarna eller företagen. Nationalekonomen John Hassler skrev i Expressen (8 maj) att staten finansierar sina krispaket genom att låna av oss medborgare. Att nämna det uppenbara – att det är nya pengar det handlar om,...

Wie links ist es etwa, wenn jüdische Studenten der Universität von Virginia von einer Initiative gegen weisse Suprematisten ausgeschlossen werden, weil sie aus Sicht ihrer gojischen, progressiven Kommilitonen und eifrigen Identitätskommissare als Juden bestimmt Israel unterstützen und damit dieselben Rassisten sind wie alle Israelis? … … Es gibt, glaube ich, noch eine weitere schreckliche Gemeinsamkeit zwischen linker und rechter Identitätspolitik … So wie die alten...

La Sagrada Famiglia (personal)   Having five grown-up kids it is not that often we manage to come together all of us. But this year we managed to spend Midsummer weekend together at the summer residence on our island. Lovely!

Der Unterschied zwischen Schweden und Deutschland ZEIT: Wenn Sie sehen, wie Experten im Fernsehen befragt werde, tut Ihnen das weh? Angner: Ja, schon. Manchmal möchte ich meinen Fernseher hineinschreien: “Das können Sie doch gar nicht wissen!” ZEIT: Der ehemalige schwedische Staatsepidemiologe Johan Giesecke hat gesagt: “Der Unterschied zwischen Schweden und Deutschland ist, dass Deutschland seine Wirtschaft ruiniert.” Angner: Johan Giesecke ist so viel in...

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The ultimate takedown of teflon coated defenders of rational expectations James Heckman, winner of the “Nobel Prize” in economics (2000), did an interview with John Cassidy in 2010. It’s an interesting read (Cassidy’s words in italics): What about the rational-expectations hypothesis, the other big theory associated with modern Chicago? How does that stack up now? I could tell you a story about my friend and colleague Milton Friedman. In the...

Economics is a discipline with the avowed ambition to produce theory for the real world. But it fails in this ambition, Lars Pålsson Syll asserts in Chapter 12, at least as far as the dominant mainstream neoclassical economic theory is concerned. Overly confident in deductivistic Euclidian methodology, neoclassical economic theory lines up series of mathematical models that display elaborate internal consistency but lack clear counterparts in the real world. Such models are at...

A ‘new’ way to solve quadratic equations (student stuff)  [embedded content]