Lars P. Syll

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On randomness and probability in economics Modern mainstream economics relies to a large degree on the notion of probability. To at all be amenable to applied economic analysis, economic observations have to be conceived as random events that are analyzable within a probabilistic framework. But is it really necessary to model the economic system as a system where randomness can only be analyzed and understood when based on an a priori notion of...

The Permanent Income Hypothesis Milton Friedman’s Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) says that people’s consumption is not affected by short-term fluctuations in incomes since people only spend more money when they think that their lifetime incomes change. Believing Friedman is right, mainstream economists have for decades argued that Keynesian fiscal policies, therefore, are ineffectual. As shown over and over again for the last three decades, empirical...

Maskinerna är våra vänner  [embedded content] Advertisements

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If you could see me now  [embedded content] Advertisements

Judith Butler — postmodern mumbo jumbo​ The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one...

The Swiss ‘Vollgeld’ referendum on June 10 Tomorrow Swiss voters will decide if the central bank is to take over total control of the country’s money supply.​ The Swiss sovereign money initiative calls for all credit issued by commercial banks to be backed with real money — ‘Vollgeld’ — created by the Swiss National Bank (SNB). But although we all justifiably fear the occurrences of new financial crises, there are strong reasons to doubt ‘sovereign money’...

Gigerenzer and Taleb on behavioural economics  [embedded content] Advertisements

Labour​ market discrimination in Germany We conducted a large-scale field experiment to investigate the drivers of discrimination against second generation immigrant job applicants. To these ends, we sent thousands of applications from fictitious persons to real job openings in eight professions all over Germany. Next to job applicants’ ethnicity (German or migration background in one out of 34 origin countries), phenotype (Asian, Black, White), and...