Lars P. Syll

Alan Krueger (1960 – 2019) I’ve subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole. David Card Back in 1992, New Jersey raised the...

Public debt — a macroeconomic necessity The problem stems from the fact that the affluent, which include successful entrepreneurs and capital owners, save relatively more than average or poor households … For this to work out, additional​ demand would have to be created … The implication of this is that there’s a macroeconomic requirement to run public deficits, founded on a demand gap that arises from households and firms wanting to set aside savings in...

MMT — the Wicksell-Le Bourva connection Comparing the limited work of Wicksell, Le Bourva, and MMT, we find that they share many similarities. Obviously, the institutions and issues being discussed have changed during the decades these scholars were writing, yet all three views agree on some fundamental issues. The methodology is quite similar, with a strong focus on balance sheets opposed to theoretical models based on assumptions that are necessary for...

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L’Italia può permettersi un vicepremier che racconta delle balle del genere?  [embedded content]

How to teach economics if you have a dissenting perspective Issue #1: How do you teach the introductory economics courses if you have a dissenting perspective? Mankiw lays out three alternatives, teaching the mainstream and suppressing your own views, teaching minority or fringe views (i.e. your own), or not teaching introductory econ at all. He says the second option is “pedagogical malpractice” … I opted for an approach neither of them consider, to...

MMT and the real issue of money and debt Austerity policies throw millions of people out of work … The lower level of output caused by austerity means there are fewer goods and services available to distribute. Society becomes objectively poorer in material production terms. How can that be helpful? … Some readers may object: what if there just isn’t enough money to buy people? If there’s just no money, it’s no good going ever further into debt. Wrong....

DSGE models — worse than useless  Among other conceptual absurdities, such as the assumption that economic actors consist of identical omniscient ‘rational agents’ all of whom have perfect information about prices and quantities everywhere in the global economy, DSGE models generally incorporate the erroneous ‘veil of barter’ notion and ignore the functioning of real monetary systems … DSGE models represent the distilled essence of the past three decades of...

 [embedded content] Yes, indeed, looking out through my library windows into​ The Magistrate’s Park, the sky is grey, rain keeps falling, and Spring seems to be far, far, away. Although it’s almost forty years now since I was a research student at the ​University of California, on a day like this, I sure wish I was back in Berkeley Marina, Tilden Park, Telegraph Avenue, Yosemite, Joshua Tree …