Lars P. Syll

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Realism and critique in economics: an interview with Lars P. Syll Jamie Morgan: To a member of the public it must seem weird that it is possible to state, as you do, such fundamental criticism of an entire field of study. The perplexing issue from a third party point of view is how do we reconcile good intention (or at least legitimate sense of self as a scholar), and power and influence in the world with error, failure and falsity in some primary sense;...

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Paul Samuelson — a case of badly invested intelligence Paul Samuelson claimed that the ‘ergodic hypothesis’ is essential for advancing economics from the realm of history to the realm of science. But is it really tenable to assume that ergodicity is essential to economics? The answer can only be — as I have argued here here here here and here — NO WAY! Obviously yours truly is far from the only researcher being critical of Paul Samuelson. This is what Ole...

Scientific advancement in economics Source

Minimal realism — much ado about nothing To generalise Mäki’s distinction between realism and realisticness, someone who believes that economic theories must or should include unrealistic assumptions is not necessarily a non-realist in the broader sense of philosophical realism: “A realist economist is permitted, indeed required, to use unrealistic assumptions in order to isolate what are believed to be the most essential features in a complex situation …...

[embedded content] Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. To simply assume that economic processes are ergodic and concentrate on ensemble averages — and hence in any relevant sense timeless — is not a sensible way for dealing with the kind of genuine uncertainty that permeates real-world economies. Ergodicity and the all-important difference between time averages and ensemble averages are difficult concepts — so let me try to explain the meaning of these...

Game theorists — people carried away by fictions Applied game theory is a theory of real-world facts, where we use game theoretical definitions, axioms, theorems and (try to) test if real-world phenomena ‘satisfy’ the axioms and the inferences made from them. When confronted with the real world we can (hopefully) judge if game theory really tells us if things are as postulated by theory. But there is also an influential group of game theoreticians that...