Lars P. Syll

Branko Milanovic and the hypocrites of the World Economic Forum Thousands of people will gather next week in Davos. Their combined wealth will reach several hundred billion dollars, perhaps even close to a trillion. Never in world history will be the amount of wealth per square foot so high. And this year, for the sixth or seventh consecutive time, what would be one of the principal topics addressed by these captains of industry, billionaires, employers of...

Wren-Lewis on internal consistency The example is the derivation of a benevolent policy maker’s preferences from the utility function of the representative consumer assumed as part of the model, a line of research initiated by Michael Woodford. Before getting on to the values point, let me note that it is a good example of the primacy of internal consistency in microfoundations rather than the Lucas critique. Before Woodford’s work, microfoundations...

RBC methodology — three decades of intellectual regress Neoclassical economics is known for its illicit use of garbled language which hides and convolutes instead of explains … An interesting example is the chapter by Edward Prescott, titled ‘RBC Methodology and the Development of Aggregate Economic Theory’ (ungated version). Let’s first give the floor to him (emphasis added), mind that ‘leisure’ means ‘measured unemployment’.: “What turned out to be the...

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New Keynesian ‘tweaking’ won’t do the job Whereas the Great Depression of the 1930s produced Keynesian economics, and the stagflation of the 1970s produced Milton Friedman’s monetarism, the Great Recession has produced no similar intellectual shift. This is deeply depressing to young students of economics, who hoped for a suitably challenging response from the profession. Why has there been none? Krugman’s answer is typically ingenious: the old...

Pornography and infidelity — moderation and mediation in SPSS [embedded content] One of the things yours truly appreciates with Andy and his book Discovering statistics using SPSS is the thought-provoking examples used … Advertisements

Reward work, not wealth Eighty-two​ percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth, according to a new Oxfam report released today … Billionaire wealth has risen by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of...

The immorality of lying The immorality of lying does not consist in the offence against sacrosanct truth​. An appeal to truth​ is scarcely a prerogative of a society which dragoons its members to own up the better to hunt them down. It ill befits universal untruth to insist on particular truth, while immediately converting it into its opposite … Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need...

A first​ precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, ‘in his thoughts’, he forgets to say what he wants to say. No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text...

Trump — the worst president ever Mr. Trump’s first year has been an unremitting parade of disgraces that have demeaned him as well as the dignity of his office, and he has shown that this is exactly how he believes he should govern. Most important, he is the first president to fail to defend the nation from an attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power — and to resist the investigation of that attack. He is the first to enrich his private...