Lars P. Syll

Hicks on the lack of scientific progress in economics Economics, also, is prone to revolutions; but they are mostly, I believe, of a different character … They are not clear advances in the scientific sense. This is not the fault of economists. It is a consequence of the nature of the facts which we study. Our facts are not permanent, or repeatable, like the facts of the natural sciences; they change incessantly, and change without repetition … Our...

Marginal productivity theory — a dangerous thought virus The marginal productivity theory of income distribution was born a little over a century ago. Its principle creator, John Bates Clark, was explicit that his theory was about ideology and not science. Clark wanted show that in capitalist societies, everyone got what they produced, and hence all was fair: “It is the purpose of this work to show that the distribution of the income of society is...

The ‘practical’ theory of the future Now a practical theory of the future … has certain marked characteristics. In particular, being based on so flimsy a foundation, it is subject to sudden and violent changes. The practice of calmness and immobility, of certainty and security, suddenly breaks down. New fears and hopes will, without warning, take charge of human conduct. The forces of disillusion may suddenly impose a new conventional basis of valuation....

Wren-Lewis trying to cope with ideology Simon Wren-Lewis has also commented on the study by Mohsen Javdani and Ha-Joon Chang — on economics and ideology — that I wrote about earlier today. Says Wren-Lewis: I also, from my own experience, want to suggest that in their formal discourse (seminars, refereeing etc) academic economists normally pretend that this ideological bias does not exist. I cannot recall anyone in any seminar saying something like ‘you only...

We need more redistribution Income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient rose by about 36% in the 1980s under Thatcher, but the real story is the share of income that goes to people at the very top: According to Greg Mankiw … in the United States the 1%’s share of total income, excluding capital gains, rose from about 8 percent in 1973 to 17 percent in 2010. Between 2010 and 2015 it’s risen from 17% to 22%!! It’s incredibly concentrated even among...

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...