Lars P. Syll

Film som verkligen betyder något (personal)  [embedded content] Filmer kan beröra oss på många olika sätt. Många är mest inget annat än rent tidsfördriv och eskapism. Men det finns också några — få — filmer som verkligen betyder något. De riktigt stora filmerna. De som på allvar tränger in under huden och skakar om oss i vårt innersta. Kjell-Åke Anderssons filmatisering av Göran Tunströms mästerverk Juloratoriet — med gudabenådad musik av Stefan Nilsson —...

Calibration — an economics fraud kit In his well-written and interesting article The Trouble with Macroeconomics, Paul Romer goes to a ​frontal attack on the theories that have put macroeconomics on a path of ‘intellectual regress’ for three decades now: Macroeconomists got comfortable with the idea that fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates are caused by imaginary shocks, instead of actions that people take, after Kydland and Prescott (1982) launched...

Fick den här urtjusiga kaffemuggen av mina kära döttrar idag på födelsedagen. De påstår det är en bild av fadern för trettio år sedan på den … Advertisements

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The second, and even more striking, contribution of the 1968 presidential address was Friedman’s introduction of the ‘natural rate of unemployment’ along with the long-run vertical Phillips curve and its accelerationist implications. The natural rate was, famously, what would be ‘ground out’ by Walrasian general equilibrium, provided it incorporated ‘the actual structural characteristics of the labor and commodity markets, including market imperfections, stochastic...

The belief in the power and necessity of formalizing economic theory mathematically has thus obliterated the distinction between cognitively perceiving and understanding concepts from different domains and mapping them into each other. Whether the age-old problem of the equality between supply and demand should be mathematically formalized as a system of inequalities or equalities is not something that should be decided by mathematical knowledge or convenience. Surely it would...

To many conservative and neoliberal politicians and economists,​ there seems to be a spectre haunting the United States and Europe today — Keynesian ideas on governments pursuing policies raising effective demand and supporting employment. And some of the favourite arguments used among these Keynesophobics to fight it are the ‘confidence argument’ and the ‘doctrine of sound finance.’ Is this witless crusade against economic reason new? Not at all. If mainstream economists had...

Der Wind hat sich gedreht im Lande  [embedded content] Advertisements

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 [embedded content] If anything, Snow’s path-breaking research underlines how important it is not to equate science with statistical calculation. All science entail human judgement, and using statistical models doesn’t relieve us of that necessity. Working with misspecified models, the scientific value of statistics is actually zero — even though you’re making valid statistical inferences! Statistical models are no substitutes for doing real science. Or as a famous German...