Lars P. Syll

Un livre publié en 2010 par Naomi Oreskes et Erik M. Conway, traduit en 2012 sous le titre Les Marchands de doute (éditions Le Pommier), a magistralement démontré, au terme de plusieurs années d’enquête, comment de grandes entreprises, souvent soutenues par des groupes d’intérêt et des organisations farouchement hostiles à l’idée même de régulation, étaient parvenues à mettre massivement en doute les résultats scientifiques les mieux établis … Dans tous les cas, les méthodes...

Why economic models do not give us explanations Economic models frequently invoke … entities that do not exist, such as perfectly rational agents, perfectly inelastic demand functions, and so on. As economists often defensively point out, other sciences too invoke non-existent entities, such as the frictionless planes of high-school physics. But there is a crucial difference: the false-ontology models of physics and other sciences are empirically...

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Time to explain ergodicity … The difference between 100 people going to a casino and one person going to a casino 100 times, i.e. between (path dependent) and conventionally understood probability. The mistake has persisted in economics and psychology since age immemorial. Consider the following thought experiment. First case, one hundred persons go to a Casino, to gamble a certain set amount each and have complimentary gin and tonic … Some may lose, some may win, and we can...

O Nuit! Viens apporter à la terre le calme enchantement de ton mystère  [embedded content]

Econometrics — a con art with no relevance whatsoever to real world economics Econometrics looks “sciency”. Once in a seminar presentation I displayed two equations, one taken from Econometrica and the other from the Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Physics and challenged the audience to tell me which is which. No one volunteered to tell me which is which, including at least one hard-core econometrician. Economics is a social science where the...

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Bei mir bist du scheen  [embedded content]

Realism and critique in economics: an interview with Lars P. Syll Jamie Morgan: To a member of the public it must seem weird that it is possible to state, as you do, such fundamental criticism of an entire field of study. The perplexing issue from a third party point of view is how do we reconcile good intention (or at least legitimate sense of self as a scholar), and power and influence in the world with error, failure and falsity in some primary sense;...