Lars P. Syll

Textbooks — peddling lies about money and finance A couple of years ago — in a debate with James Galbraith and Willem Buiter — Paul Krugman made it perfectly clear that he was a strong believer of the ‘loanable funds’ theory. Unfortunately, this is not an exception among ‘New Keynesian’ economists. Neglecting anything resembling a real-world finance system, Greg Mankiw — in his intermediate textbook Macroeconomics — more or less equates finance to the...

Debunking the NAIRU hoax In our extended NAIRU model, labor productivity growth is included in the wage bargaining process … The logical consequence of this broadening of the theoretical canvas has been that the NAIRU becomes endogenous itself and ceases to be an attractor — Milton Friedman’s natural, stable and timeless equilibrium point from which the system cannot permanently deviate. In our model, a deviation from the initial equilibrium affects not...

DSGE models in the ‘New Keynesian’ repair shop The problem of the DSGE-models (and more generally of rational expectations macroeconomic models) is that they assume extraordinary cognitive capabilities of individual agents. Recent developments in other disciplines including psychology and brain science overwhelmingly document that individual agents struggle with limited cognitive abilities, restricting their capacity to understand the world. As a result,...

What does concern me about my discipline … is that its current core — by which I mainly mean the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach — has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the precision that it has about the real one … While it often makes sense to assume rational expectations for a limited application to isolate a particular mechanism that is distinct from...

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Why some economists lie I think there is an element of truth in the view that the superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times [is necessary]. Once it is debunked, [it] takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. There must be discipline in the allocation of resources or you will have anarchistic chaos and inefficiency. And one of the functions of old fashioned religion was to scare people by...

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Many mainstream economists have the idea that because heterodox people — like yours truly — often criticize the application of mathematics in economics, we are critical of math per se. This is totally unfounded and ridiculous. I do not know how many times I have been asked to answer this straw-man objection to heterodox economics. No, there is nothing wrong with mathematics per se. No, there is nothing wrong with applying mathematics to economics. Mathematics is one valuable...

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You were right! On May 5, 1818, in the southern German town of Trier, in the picturesque wine-growing region of the Moselle Valley, Karl Marx was born … As we reach the bicentennial of Marx’s birth, what lessons might we draw from his dangerous and delirious philosophical legacy? What precisely is Marx’s lasting contribution? … The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not “philosophy” but...

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