Lars P. Syll

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The biggest trouble with modern​ macroeconomics The trouble is not so much that macroeconomists say things that are inconsistent with the facts. The real trouble is that other economists do not care that the macroeconomists do not care about the facts. An indifferent tolerance of obvious error is even more corrosive to science than committed advocacy of error. Paul Romer  New-Classical-Real-Business-Cycles-DSGE-New-Keynesian microfounded macromodels try to...

Keynes — en sällsynt fågel Alfred Marshall skrev en gång att “bra ekonomer är sällsynta fåglar.” Det stämmer verkligen. En av dessa sällsynta fåglar var definitivt John Maynard Keynes. Och nu har den norske ekonomiprofessorn Björn-Ivar Davidsen skrivit en bok om denne sällsynt kompetente ekonom, filosof, statstjänsteman, spekulant, utopist, universitetsmecenat, konstsamlare, med mera, med mera. I boken får vi följa med på en resa i Keynes’ biografiska...

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Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural science, the material to which it is applied is, in too many respects, not homogeneous through time. The object of a model is to segregate the semi-permanent or relatively constant factors from those which are transitory or fluctuating so as to develop a logical way of thinking...

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Keeping the dream alive For me, the study of asymmetric information was a very first step toward the realization of a dream. That dream was the development of a behavioral macroeconomics in the original spirit of Keynes’ General Theory. Macroeconomics would then no longer suffer from the ad hockery of the neoclassical synthesis, which had over-ridden the emphasis in The General Theory on the role of psychological and sociological factors, such as cognitive...

But these more recent writers like their predecessors were still dealing with a system in which the amount of the factors employed was given and the other relevant facts were known more or less for certain … At any given time facts and expectations were assumed to be given in a definite and calculable form … The calculus of probability, tho mention of it was kept in the background, was supposed to be capable of reducing uncertainty to the same calculable status as that of...

Courage that will live on forever  [embedded content] Seventy-five years ago, on February 22, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl — members of the resistance group ‘Die Weisse Rose’ — were killed by the Nazis. Courage is not anything very common, and the value we put on it is a witness to its rarity. Courage is a capability to confront fear, as when in front of the powerful and mighty, not to step back, but stand up for one’s rights not to be humiliated or abused...

Economics — a science with wacky views of human behaviour​ There is something about the way economists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. The one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics still has not given way to methodological pluralism based on ontological considerations (rather than formalistic tractability). In their search for...