Lars P. Syll

No reality, please. We’re economists! Mathematics, especially through the work of David Hilbert, became increasingly viewed as a discipline properly concerned with providing a pool of frameworks for possible realities. No longer was mathematics seen as the language of (non-social) nature, abstracted from the study of the latter. Rather, it was conceived as a practice concerned with formulating systems comprising sets of axioms and their deductive...

Schwarzer Tag in der deutschen Geschichte  [embedded content]

Although most social scientists can recite the formal definitions of the various regression assumptions, many have little appreciation of the substantive meanings of these assumptions. And unless the meanings of these assumptions are understood, regression analysis almost inevitably will be a rigid exercise in which a handful of independent variables are cavalierly inserted into a standard linear additive regression and coefficients are estimated. Although such an exercise may...

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Friedrich Nietzsche — von Rechtsextremen missbraucht Heute gibt es rechte Wortführer, die Donald Trump allen Ernstes als Übermenschen à la Nietzsche bezeichnen. Doch für Nietzsche selbst hätte Trump eher das Gegenteil verkörpert. Machtwütige Manager, die rastlos um die Welt jetten, hätte er als Sklaven gesehen. Eher wäre Greta Thunberg, die unbeirrbare Vorkämpferin der Fridays-for-Future-Bewegung, ein Übermensch in seinem Sinne. In Also sprach Zarathustra...

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Die ‘Schwarze Null’ ist eine falsche Ideologie  [embedded content]

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Joan Robinson on why it is so import to study economics The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.