Lars P. Syll

Die Dynamik des Rechtsrucks Zehn Jahre lang, Woche für Woche, wurde ich merkwürdigerweise nicht müde, diese Nachweise immer und immer wieder abzuliefern. All die Jahre meinte ich, durch meine Tätigkeit als politische Kommentatorin unmittelbaren Einfluss auf den Meinungsbildungsprozess nehmen zu müssen … Erst werden sie reden, dann werden sie handeln. Wir müssen Rassisten, wo immer sie auftauchen, entlarven. Auf keinen Fall schweigen, nicht wegducken....

How do models relate to reality?  [embedded content] Advertisements

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New Keynesians use mathematics to ‘prove’ some very odd stuff … Take, for example, a paper by Campbell Leith and Simon Wren-Lewis entitled Electoral Uncertainty and the Deficit Bias in a New Keynesian Economy. The thrust of the paper is that our particular form of party-based democracy naturally leads to ‘deficit bias’ … The authors identify the root problem to be one of ‘heterogeneity’ — the fact that different political parties will have different views about how to run the...

Requiem for my friend (personal) [embedded content] Bengt Nilsson In Memoriam A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you Advertisements

Erdogan und die andere Türkei  [embedded content] Advertisements

Instrumentalvariabler och heterogenitet — en kommentar (wonkish) Användandet av instrumentalvariabler används numera flitigt bland ekonomer och andra samhällsforskare. Inte minst när man vill försöka gå bakom statistikens ‘korrelationer’ och också säga något om ‘kausalitet.’ Tyvärr brister det ofta rejält i tolkningen av de resultat man får med hjälp av den vanligaste metoden som används för detta syfte — statistisk regressionsanalys. Ett exempel från...

RBC — nothing but total horseshit! They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and inertia they find objectionable in other theories of business fluctuations … I try to point out how incapable the new equilibrium business cycles models are of explaining the most obvious observed facts of...

[embedded content] Economics may be an informative tool for research. But if its practitioners do not investigate and make an effort of providing a justification for the credibility of the assumptions on which they erect their building, it will not fulfil its task. There is a gap between its aspirations and its accomplishments, and without more supportive evidence to substantiate its claims, critics — like yours truly — will continue to consider its ultimate arguments as a...

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