Lars P. Syll

Die ‘schwarze Null’ ist kein ideal Christian Kastrop … ist gewissermaßen der Erfinder der deutschen Schuldenbremse, als Unterabteilungsleiter im Finanzministerium entwickelte er das Konzept einer im Grundgesetz verankerten Regel, die die öffentliche Kreditaufnahme begrenzt. Heute ist Kastrop Europa-Direktor bei der Bertelsmann Stiftung und beschäftigt sich immer noch mit Schulden – nur dass er sie nicht mehr begrenzen will, sondern ermöglichen. Ausgerechnet...

Four days ago Trump called Danish Prime Minister ‘nasty’ Yesterday he said she was a ‘wonderful woman’ [embedded content] STATLER: Booo! WALDORF: Booo! S: That was the worst thing I’ve ever heard! W: It was terrible! S: Horrendous! W: Well it wasn’t that bad. S: Oh, yeah? W: Well, there were parts of it I liked! S: Well, I liked a lot of it. W: Yeah, it was GOOD actually. S: It was great! W: It was wonderful! S: Yeah, bravo! W: More! S: More!

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How would you react if a renowned physicist, say, ​Richard Feynman, was telling you that sometimes force is proportional to acceleration and at other times it is proportional to acceleration squared? I guess you would be unimpressed. But actually, what most mainstream economists do amounts to the same strange thing when it comes to theory development and model modification. In mainstream economic theory,​ preferences are standardly expressed in the form of a utility function....

Les théorèmes d’incomplétude de Gödel  [embedded content]

Om konsten att läsa och skriva Hur ska man läsa? Det är nog en rätt vanlig fundering alla någon gång har haft kring vårt förhållningssätt till litteratur och läsande. Själv får jag anledning fundera kring detta när min älskade — som oförtrutet slukar nya böcker i ett rasande tempo — åter igen försöker övertala mig att ställa tillbaka Röda rummet, Hemsöborna, Martin Bircks ungdom, Den allvarsamma leken, Jerusalem eller Gösta Berlings saga i biblioteket och...

L’Amazonie brûle et Bolsonaro s’en fiche  [embedded content]

Der deutsch-sowjetische Nichtangriffspakt — auch als Hitler-Stalin-Pakt bekannt — wurde am 23. August 1939 unterzeichnet. Der Pakt garantierte dem Deutschen Reich die sowjetische Neutralität bei einer kriegerischen Auseinandersetzung mit den Westmächten. [embedded content]

Rethinking Economics actually gives a pretty good description of the state of modern macroeconomics here. There is a purist streak in economics that wants everything to follow from asumming things like ‘rationality’ and ‘equilibrium.’ That purist streak has given birth to a kind ‘deductivist blindness’ of mainstream economics, something that also to a larger extent explains why it contributes to causing economic crises rather than to solving them. But where does this...

What — if anything — do p-values test? Unless enforced by study design and execution, statistical assumptions usually have no external justification; they may even be quite implausible. As result, one often sees attempts to justify specific assumptions with statistical tests, in the belief that a high p-value or ‘‘nonsignificance’’ licenses the assumption and a low p-value refutes it. Such focused testing is based on a meta-assumption that every other...