Lars P. Syll

It’s said that a star falls from heaven each time someone dies  [embedded content]In loving memory of my mother Lisbeth Lissmark Pålsson (1937-1989). Those whom the gods love die young.

Piketty and the need for validating assumptions Say we have a diehard neoclassical model (assuming the production function is homogeneous of degree one and unlimited substitutability) such as the standard Cobb-Douglas production function (with A a given productivity parameter, and k  the ratio of capital stock to labor, K/L) y = Akα , with a constant investment λ out of output y and a constant depreciation rate δ of the “capital per worker” k, where the...

My friend the forest  [embedded content] This one is for you, Jan Milch. A friend non plus ultra.

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La ‘cancel culture’ aux Etats-Unis Aux Etats-Unis, la nouvelle gauche, née des mouvements #metoo et Black Lives Matter, serait à l’origine d’un phénomène qui inquiète de nombreux intellectuels américains, la « cancel culture », autrement dit une tendance à vouloir faire taire des voix jugées dissonantes, dangereuses ou haineuses. Né sur les réseaux sociaux, ce phénomène se traduit par des mobilisations qui ont fini par provoquer des démissions, renvois,...

Why the euro has to be abandoned if Europe is to be saved The euro has taken away the possibility for national governments to manage their economies in a meaningful way — and the people have​ had to pay the true costs of its concomitant misguided austerity policies. The unfolding of the repeated economic crises in euroland during the last decade has shown beyond any doubts that the euro is not only an economic project​ but just as much a political one. What...

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In Radical Uncertainty, John Kay and Mervyn King, two well-known British economists, state that rather than trying to understand the ever-changing, uncertain and ambiguous environment by trying to understand “what’s going on here”, the economics profession has become dominated by an approach to uncertainty that requires a comprehensive list of possible outcomes with well-defined numerical probabilities attached to them. Drawing widely on philosophy, anthropology, economics,...

What’s wrong with economics — a primer This is an important and fundamentally correct critique of the core methodology of economics: individualistic; analytical; ahistorical; asocial; and apolitical. What economics understands is important. What it ignores is, alas, equally important. As Skidelsky, famous as the biographer of Keynes, notes, “to maintain that market competition is a self-sufficient ordering principle is wrong. Markets are embedded in...

Das Attentat vom 20. Juli 1940  [embedded content] Wo liegt eigentlich der Punkt, an dem man widerstehen muss, wenn man nicht die Freiheit hoffnungslos preisgeben will, die Freiheit, die keine Macht der Welt wieder herstellen kann? Diese Frage lässt sich mit einem Wort beantworten. Dieses eine Wort heisst Verantwortung im Sinne letzter persönlicher Verantwortung. Wo die persönliche Verantwortung negiert und dahinten gelassen wird, gibt es keine Freiheit...