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Lars Pålsson Syll
Professor at Malmö University. Primary research interest - the philosophy, history and methodology of economics.

Lars P. Syll

Feynman’s trick (student stuff)

Feynman’s trick (student stuff)  [embedded content] I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me. [It] showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign – it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. [If] guys at...

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Alberto Alesina and the theory of ‘expansionary austerity’

Alberto Alesina, the prominent Harvard University economist and main architect behind the theory of ‘expansionary austerity,’ has died at age 63, Italian media reports today. RIP. As we all know there has been an obsession with government budget deficits since the crisis of 2008. Alesina’s ideas — mostly building on econometric analyses — about austerity expansion basically boils down to the hope that if you cut deficits, the confidence fairy will make business people invest....

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Economic models and reality

Economic models and reality The abandonment of efforts to match real structures has led to disaster, as models of economic theory have grown progressively distant from reality. Attempts to fix the problem have failed to address the cause. Economists look at bad models, and say we should replace these by better models. But the process by which models are evaluated, the underlying methodology, is not examined. The real problem lies much deeper than bad models...

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