Lars P. Syll

Dags för flumpedagogers självrannsakan I dag kan vi se resultatet av nittiotalets pedagogiska ‘upplysning’. Undersökningar som PISA och TIMSS ger klara besked, den svenska skolan har försämrats på ett sätt som saknar motstycke i internationella mätningar … Det vore kanske på sin plats att vi rannsakade oss själva och den skoldebatt vi fört under de senaste tjugo åren. En sådan avbön från nittiotalets idéer om den goda läraren skulle vara ett väsentligt...

Why your friends are more popular than you are  [embedded content]

Putting sticky-price DSGE lipstick on the RBC pig ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists have for years been arguing (e.g. here) about the importance of the New Classical counter-revolution in economics. ‘Helping’ to change the way macroeconomics is done today — with rational expectations, Euler equations, intertemporal optimization and microfoundations — their main critique of New Classical macroeconomics is that it didn’t incorporate price stickiness into the...

The essence of scientific reasoning In deductive reasoning all knowledge obtainable is already latent in the postulates. Rigour is needed to prevent the successive inferences growing less and less accurate as we proceed. The conclusions are never more accurate than the data. In inductive reasoning we are performing part of the process by which new knowledge is created. The conclusions normally grow more and more accurate as more data are included. It should...

The greatest of them all  [embedded content] Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Adorno — the value of negativity  [embedded content]

Adorno — une vie, une oeuvre  [embedded content]

Teaching of economics — captured by a small and dangerous sect The fallacy of composition basically consists of the false belief that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts.  In the society and in the economy this is arguably not the case. An adequate analysis of society and economy a fortiori can’t proceed by just adding up the acts and decisions of individuals. The whole is more than a sum of parts. This fact shows up when...

 [embedded content]

Samuelson’s reconciliation of the micro-economic ideal type with involuntary unemployment was repudiated, along with Keynesian prescriptions, in favor of a view that there could be no involuntary unemployment , hence that government action was unnecessary. The result was a doctrinaire derivation of the laissez-faire conclusions that had been overturned by the formalist revolution; economics was now cleansed of Keynesian impurities that had been introduced in the interest of...