Lars P. Syll

Donald Trump — un poisson d’avril totalement hors-saison Stupéfaction, haussements de sourcils inquiets, abattement. Les Danois sont passés par toutes les phases de la surprise vendredi 16 août, en découvrant l’article du quotidien américain The Wall Street Journal. Celui-ci affirmait que le président américain, Donald Trump, aurait demandé à plusieurs occasions à ses conseillers s’il serait possible d’acheter le Groenland, un territoire danois. Une...

Mainstream (neoclassical) economics has always put a strong emphasis on the positivist conception of the discipline, characterizing economists and their views as objective, unbiased, and non-ideological … Acknowledging that ideology resides quite comfortably in our economics departments would have huge intellectual implications, both theoretical and practical. In spite (or because?) of that, the matter has never been directly subjected to empirical scrutiny. In a recent study,...

To get right down to it, I suspect that the attempt to construct economics as an axiomatically based hard science is doomed to fail. There are many partially overlapping reasons for believing this … A modern economy is a very complicated system. Since we cannot conduct controlled on its smaller parts, or even observe them in isolation, the classical hard- science devices for discriminating between competing hypotheses are closed to us. The main alternative device is the...

La pédophilie et l’Eglise catholique  [embedded content]

[embedded content]Trying to delineate the difference between ‘New Keynesianism’ and ‘Post Keynesianism’ — during an interview a couple of years ago — yours truly was confronted by the odd and confused view that Axel Leijonhufvud was a ‘New Keynesian.’ I wasn’t totally surprised — I had run into that misapprehension before — but still, it’s strange how wrong people sometimes get things. The  last time I met Axel, we were both invited keynote speakers at the conference “Keynes...

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The atomistic fallacy explained …  [embedded content]

Statistics and mathematics — not very helpful for understanding economies Statistical science is not really very helpful for understanding or forecasting complex evolving self-healing organic ambiguous social systems – economies, in other words. A statistician may have done the programming, but when you press a button on a computer keyboard and ask the computer to find some good patterns, better get clear a sad fact: computers do not think. They do exactly...

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In most econometrics textbooks the authors give an interpretation of a linear regression such as Y = a + bX, saying that a one-unit increase in X (years of education) will cause a b unit increase in Y (wages). Dealing with time-series regressions this may well be OK. The problem is that this ‘dynamic’ interpretation of b is standardly also given as the ‘explanation’ of the slope coefficient for cross-sectional data. But in that case, the only increase that can generally come...