Lars P. Syll

The weird absence of money and finance in economic theory Consider the problem of money. Money is of central importance to any modern capitalist market economy. Yet it is mainly sociologists, philosophers and dissenters that have maintained an interest in what money “is” with a view to continued critique and development … One might think this is because economics has already provided an agreed clear concept of money. But this is not the case. Contemporary...

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A couple of years ago, in a lecture on the US recession, Robert Lucas gave an outline of what the New Classical school of macroeconomics today thinks on the latest downturns in the US economy and its future prospects. Lucas starts by showing that real US GDP has grown at an average yearly rate of 3 per cent since 1870, with one big dip during the Depression of the 1930s and a big – but smaller – dip in the recent recession. After stating his view that the US recession that...

Boris Johnson — la promesse d’une calamité pour le Royaume-Uni «Quelle révélation pourrait encore faire dérailler sa marche vers Downing Street, alors qu’il s’est maintes fois rendu coupable de mensonge, de tricherie, de déloyauté, de paresse, d’indiscrétion, d’incompétence, de mépris cynique pour les autres, sans jamais en subir les conséquences ? », se demandait la journaliste Sonia Purnell, une ancienne subordonnée de Boris Johnson pendant ses années de...

Bitte besteuert uns stärker! In einem offenen Brief haben sich mehrere reiche US-Unternehmer für die Einführung einer Vermögensteuer ausgesprochen. Zu den Initiatoren gehören etwa der Milliardär George Soros, Facebook-Mitbegründer Chris Hughes sowie Disney-Erben und die Besitzer der Hotelkette Hyatt. Sie rufen die Präsidentschaftsbewerber für die Wahl 2020 auf, eine gemäßigte Vermögensteuer zu unterstützen. “Amerika steht in der moralischen, ethischen und...

What is wrong with modern economics? It is simply that modern economists persist in insisting that a set of tools be everywhere adopted that are mostly inadequate to social analysis, given the nature of social phenomena … To put the matter bluntly (the pun may be useful), it is like attempting to cut the grass with a hammer or a piece of paper. The latter objects have their uses, but mowing the lawn is not one of them. Methods of applied mathematics of the...

The difference between statistical and causal assumptions There are three fundamental differences between statistical and causal assumptions. First, statistical assumptions, even untested, are testable in principle, given sufficiently large sample and sufficiently fine measurements. Causal assumptions, in contrast, cannot be verified even in principle, unless one resorts to experimental control. This difference is especially accentuated in Bayesian...

President Trump talking bollocks President Trump believes we live in a zero-sum world in which one country’s gain is another’s loss. This is evident in his reaction to Mario Draghi’s comment this week that additional monetary stimulus will be needed if euro zone inflation doesn’t rise. Trump tweeted: “Mario Draghi just announced more stimulus could come, which immediately dropped the Euro against the Dollar, making it unfairly easier for them to compete...

Why statistics does not give us causality If contributions made by statisticians to the understanding of causation are to be taken over with advantage in any specific field of inquiry, then what is crucial is that the right relationship should exist between statistical and subject-matter concerns … Where the ultimate aim of research is not prediction per se but rather causal explanation, an idea of causation that is expressed in terms of predictive power —...

Hicks on probability calculus To understand real world ‘non-routine’ decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour, ergodic probability distributions are of no avail. In a world full of genuine uncertainty — where real historical time rules the roost — the probabilities that ruled the past are not necessarily those that will rule the future. When we cannot accept that the observations, along the time-series available to us, are independent … we have, in...