Lars P. Syll

Ett sista glas (personal) År 2018 var — precis som de flesta år — ett år med både glädje och sorg. För mig kommer året ändå alltid att främst förknipppas med att det var året då min bäste vän sedan mer än trettio år  — Bengt Nilsson — gick ur tiden. Inga ord kan riktigt beskriva vad man känner när en människa man älskat inte längre finns där. Man minns skratten, glädjen, omtanken, den mäktiga intelligensen, den drastiska humorn, och det starka sociala...

Nordhaus dangerous gamble for humanity’s future Nordhaus’s transgressions are immense. His ‘damage function’ which he uses to estimate global warming damage is incorrect and uses data that has nothing to do with climate change. Despite this, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses his model to advise governments about the economic impact of global warming. Nordhaus and other mainstream climate economists certainly have a lot to answer for....

Elmar Altvater In Memoriam Elmar Altvater was a renowned political economist and professor at the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Freie Universität Berlin from 1970 until 2006. Until his death in 2018 he was a point of reference for several generations of students, left-wing academics and politicians, trade union activists, representatives of civil society organizations in Germany, across Europe and in Latin America. He became one of the few academics in Germany who...

Les marionnettes de Milton Friedman Alors le capitalisme est-il curable ? La primauté à l’actionnaire (shareholder primacy) n’est pas inscrite dans ses gènes. Elle a prospéré dans les années 1980, quand la mort annoncée du communisme a donné des ailes aux partisans d’une économie de marché débridée. « Cela a causé tant de tort au capitalisme que même Lénine n’aurait pas fait mieux », ironisait Felix Rohatyn, figure historique de la banque Lazard … Plus les...

Why policy design without theory is useless Taking into account the methodologies that support some policy practices that favour inductive reasoning and randomized control trials of impact evaluation (RCTs), there is a controversy around the utilization of these attempts to build experimental programmes or policy intervention … As the decision-making policy process in the real world relies on institutional factors that may be different elsewhere, the...

Facebook’s digital currency Libra — just for suckers or a global economic revolution? Mit 20 Partnern hat Facebook die digitale Weltwährung “Libra” angekündigt … Mit einem Schlag kann das Konsortium alle nur denkbaren Netzwerkeffekte im digitalen Zahlungsbereich ausschöpfen. Damit ist Libra unmittelbar und überall präsent. Eine globale ökonomische Revolution. Die Digitalökonomie folgt der Regel “The winner takes it all”. Wer die Netzwerkeffekte auf seiner...

Do models make economics a science? Well, if we are to believe most mainstream economists, models are what make economics a science. In a Journal of Economic Literature review of Dani Rodrik’s Economics Rules, renowned game theorist Ariel Rubinstein discusses Rodrik’s justifications for the view that “models make economics a science.” Although Rubinstein has some doubts about those justifications — models are not indispensable for telling good stories or...

Capital et idéologie — le nouveau livre de Thomas Piketty Que trouve-t-on dans ce nouvel opus imposant de 1 200 pages ? Il faut revenir sur ce qui a fait le succès du livre précédent : le constat empirique de la dynamique des inégalités sur une longue période. Le propos est à la fois plus historique – on remonte jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle – et plus large, couvrant de nombreux pays européens, en particulier la France et le Royaume-Uni, mais aussi les Etats-Unis,...

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The lack of positive results in econometrics For the sake of balancing the overly rosy picture of econometric achievements given in the usual econometrics textbooks today, it may be interesting to see how Trygve Haavelmo — with the completion (in 1958) of the twenty-fifth volume of Econometrica — assessed the role of econometrics in the advancement of economics.  We have found certain general principles which would seem to make good sense. Essentially,...