Lars P. Syll

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...

Economics for the 21st century 1. Change the goal: from GDP growth to the Doughnut. For over half a century, economists have fixated on GDP as the first measure of economic progress, but GDP is a false goal waiting to be ousted. The 21st century calls for a far more ambitious and global economic goal: meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet. Draw that goal on the page and – odd though it sounds – it comes out looking like a doughnut … 2. See...

Swiss sovereign money referendum  [embedded content] The people behind the proposal​ in Switzerland​ are effectively trying to get gold back into the monetary system. This is an extremely​ bad idea. Eighty-seven years ago Keynes could congratulate Great Britain on finally having got rid of the biggest ”barbarous relic” of his time – the gold standard. He lamented that advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it now is from the spirit and...

 [embedded content] Vor 50 Jahren rebellierte die Jugend. Viele beriefen sich dabei auf Philosophen wie Theodor Adorno und Herbert Marcuse. Was haben uns diese Denker heute noch zu sagen? Ein Gespräch mit dem Historiker und Philosophen Philipp Felsch über die Meisterdenker von damals. Advertisements

Living high and feeling low High-altitude areas — particularly the US intermountain states — have increased rates of suicide and depression, suggests a review of research evidence in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The increased suicide rates might be explained by blood oxygen levels due to low atmospheric pressure, according to the article by Brent Michael Kious, MD, PhD, of University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and colleagues … They analyzed 12 studies,...

Niall Ferguson and​ conservative gaslighting Last week The Stanford Daily reported a curious story concerning Niall Ferguson, a conservative historian who is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. The story itself, although ugly, isn’t that important. But it offers a window into a reality few people, certainly in the news media, are willing to acknowledge: the bad faith that pervades conservative discourse … Ferguson is, as it happens, one of those...