Lars P. Syll

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 …

La femme qui est dans mon lit  [embedded content] Cette chanson a été un produit de la collaboration entre Serge Reggiani et Georges Moustaki. Les vers du commencement sont d’un poème de Charles Baudelaire.

Hyman Minsky and the IS-LM obfuscation As young research stipendiate in the U.S. yours truly had the great pleasure and privilege of having Hyman Minsky as a teacher. He was a great inspiration at the time. He still is. The concepts which it is usual to ignore or deemphasize in interpreting Keynes — the cyclical perspective, the relations between investment and finance, and uncertainty, are the keys to an understanding of the full significance of his...

MMT — modern monetary realism MMT is not, as its opponents seem to think, primarily a set of policy ideas. Rather, it is essentially a description of how a modern credit economy actually works – how money is created and destroyed, by governments and by banks, and how financial markets function. Nor is MMT new: it is based on the work of John Maynard Keynes, whose A Treatise on Money pointed out back in 1930 that “modern States” have functioned this way for...

Veckans dumstrut — finansminister Magdalena Andersson Redan nu frågar sig ekonomer vilka motiv regeringen har för att inte satsa mer och låna mer, särskilt som räntorna ligger under nollpunkten och alla ser att Sverige behöver rejäla investeringar i allt från infrastruktur till vård och välfärd. Men en intervju med affärstidningen Bloomberg har dock finansminister Magdalena Andersson sagt att hon kommer att ha en bra förklaring till att hon inte öppnat...

I am I said  [embedded content]