Lars P. Syll

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Don’t think like a freak In their latest book, Think Like a Freak, co-authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner tell a story about meeting David Cameron in London before he was Prime Minister. They told him that the U.K.’s National Health Service — free, unlimited, lifetime health care — was laudable but didn’t make practical sense. “We tried to make our point with a thought experiment,” they write … Rather than seeing the humor and realizing that health...

I think I’ll get a manicure … In 1936, Keynes sat next to the British playwright W.H. Auden at a dinner and paid close attention to his fingers. Auden, wrote Keynes, was most​ charming, intelligent, straightforward​, youthful, a sort of senior undergraduate; altogether delightful, but but but — his finger nails are eaten to the bones with dirt and wet, one of the worst cases ever, like a preparatory schoolboy. So the infantilism is not altogether put on. It...

[embedded content] Den oförliknelige själv sprang man på då och då som ung student i Lund på 1970-talet. En i alla avseenden märkvärdig person!

Simon Evans and Tim Harford on Keynes   Click here to listen.

Så här löser vi skoleländet Ett skäl att rikta ett statsbidrag till lärarassistenter kan vara att staten vill tillföra mer resurser till skolan. Eftersom kommunerna är självständiga är emellertid detta ett rätt hopplöst sätt. Inget hindrar kommunen från att helt enkelt stuva om i skolbudgeten så att mer resurser läggs på de assistenter som kommer med statsbidrag, samtidigt som skolbudgeten hålls konstant. I så fall är det enda man åstadkommer att skolor...

VW und die brasilianische Diktatur Hand in Hand  [embedded content] After having watched this film I hope all of you, who have perhaps been thinking of buying a Volkswagen, think twice.

Kaldor-Verdoorn and long-run demand effects In standard mainstream economic analysis — take a quick look in e.g. Mankiw’s or Krugman’s textbooks — a demand expansion may very well raise measured productivity in the short run. But in the long run, expansionary demand policy measures cannot lead to sustained higher productivity and output levels. In some non-standard heterodox analyses, however, labour productivity growth is often described as a function of...

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General equilibrium — economics as ideology Although I never believed it when I was young and held scholars in great respect, it does seem to be the case that ideology plays a large role in economics. How else to explain Chicago’s acceptance of not only general equilibrium but a particularly simplified version of it as ‘true’ or as a good enough approximation to the truth? Or how to explain the belief that the only correct models are linear and that the von...