Lars P. Syll

On limits of the system — Keynes and Marx  [embedded content]

 If failing to understand some basic Keynes­ian relations is a part of the explanation of what happened, there was also another, and more subtle, story behind the confounded economics of austerity. There was an odd confusion in policy thinking between the real need for institutional reform in Europe and the imagined need for austerity – two quite different things … An analogy can help to make the point clearer: it is as if a person had asked for an antibiotic for his fever,...

Why do I blog?

Fundamental uncertainty due to unknown and unknowable future events prevents rational calculations from accurately anticipating the future. This implies that the expectations that intentionally rational actors hold are not of the kind assumed by rational expectations theory. The proposition developed in the paper states instead that expectations are fictional in the sense that they are based on pretensions of future states of the world. Understanding decision processes based...

Demand effects in the long run In the standard mainstream economic analysis — take a quick look in e.g. Mankiw’s or Krugman’s textbooks — a demand expansion may very well raise measured productivity in the short run. But in the long run, expansionary demand policy measures cannot lead to sustained higher productivity and output levels. In some non-standard heterodox analyses, however, labour productivity growth is often described as a function of output...

Les garçons de la plage  [embedded content]

Why the father of modern statistics — R A Fisher — denied smoking causes cancer In 1959, Fisher denounced his colleagues for manufacturing anti-smoking “propaganda” … He did not dispute that smoking and lung cancer tended to rise and fall together—that is, that they were correlated. But Hill and Doll and the entire British medical establishment had committed “an error … of an old kind, in arguing from correlation to causation,” he wrote in a letter to...

Min landskapsupplevelse är starkast och rikast här, därför att den har djupa rötter i ständigt växande minnesavlagringar, rötter som når ner till barndomsupplevelsernas källvatten. Det enda verkligt nya man får uppleva som vuxen är kärleken. Allt annat som är värt ordet upplevelser är egentligen projektioner av de starka barndomsupplevelsens, de stora, utvidgande upptäckterna av världen och det egna jaget. Sven Barthel/Roland Svensson

Raj Chetty — big data ‘solutions’ to poverty Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and those improvements can help the next generation achieve better outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if their children had better prospects, but also...

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