Lars P. Syll

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Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone  [embedded content] Acclaimed soul singer behind hit Ain’t No Sunshine, Bill Withers, has died from heart complications aged 81. RIP.

Politiska reformer bakom ökade ojämlikheten Både den rikaste och den fattigaste tiondelen av befolkningen sticker ut i statistiken, men det finns även skillnader inom dessa grupper. Under 70-talet minskade de rikaste 10 procentens andel av inkomsterna från omkring en fjärdedel till en femtedel, men har sedan 1980 knaprat sig tillbaka. Den rikaste procentens andel har däremot nästan fördubblats till cirka 7 procent av landets samlade inkomster. Det mesta av...

Cauchy logic and economics  [embedded content] Yours truly has no problem with solving problems in mathematics by ‘defining’ them away. But how about the real world? Maybe that ought to be a question to ponder even for economists all to fond of uncritically following the mathematical way when applying their mathematical models to the real world, where indeed “you can never have infinitely many heaps” … In econometrics we often run into the ‘Cauchy logic’ —...

Det har uppstått ett brett politiskt stöd under coronakrisen för finanspolitiska stimulanser i de enskilda EU-länderna (och i Storbritannien). EU har åtminstone tillfälligt släppt sina stränga krav på offentlig budgetbalans och de nationella regeringarna har tvingats att göra avkall på sina egna finanspolitiska regler. Den expansiva finanspolitiken på ländernivå för att rädda jobb och företag har få restriktioner. Långräntorna är låga och kommer förmodligen att sjunka...

Dumb and Dumber — the Chicago version A couple of years ago, in a lecture on the US recession, Robert Lucas gave an outline of what the New Classical school of macroeconomics today thinks on the latest downturns in the US economy and its future prospects. Lucas starts by showing that real US GDP has grown at an average yearly rate of 3 per cent since 1870, with one big dip during the Depression of the 1930s and a big – but smaller – dip in the recent...

Game theory — a scientific cul-de-sac Half a century ago there were widespread hopes game theory would provide a unified theory of social science. Today it has become obvious those hopes did not materialize. This ought to come as no surprise. Reductionist and atomistic models of social interaction — such as the ones mainstream economics and game theory are founded on — will never deliver sustainable building blocks for a realist and relevant social science....

COVID-19 depression antidote (II)  [embedded content]

Many American undergraduates in Economics interested in doing a Ph.D. are surprised to learn that the first year of an Econ Ph.D. feels much more like entering a Ph.D. in solving mathematical models by hand than it does with learning economics. Typically, there is very little reading or writing involved, but loads and loads of fast algebra is required. Why is it like this? … One reason to use math is that it is easy to use math to trick people. Often, if you make your...

Good reasons to become a Keynesian Until [2008], when the banking industry came crashing down and depression loomed for the first time in my lifetime, I had never thought to read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, despite my interest in economics … I had heard that it was a very difficult book and that the book had been refuted by Milton Friedman, though he admired Keynes’s earlier work on monetarism. I would not have been surprised by,...