Lars P. Syll

Deaton-Cartwright-Senn-Gelman on the limited value of randomization In Social Science and Medicine (December 2017), Angus Deaton & Nancy Cartwright argue that RCTs do not have any warranted special status. They are, simply, far from being the ‘gold standard’ they are usually portrayed as: Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are increasingly popular in the social sciences, not only in medicine. We argue that the lay public, and sometimes researchers, put...

Neoclassical economics is great — if it wasn’t for all the caveats! I think that modern neoclassical economics is in fine shape as long as it is understood as the ideological and substantive legitimating doctrine of the political theory of possessive individualism. As long as we have relatively-self-interested liberal individuals who have relatively-strong beliefs that things are theirs, the competitive market in equilibrium is an absolutely wonderful...

Simon Wren-Lewis — anti-pluralist mainstream flimflam defender Again and again, Oxford professor Simon Wren-Lewis rides out to defend orthodox macroeconomic theory against attacks from heterodox critics. In his latest attack on heterodox economics and students demanding pluralist economics education he writes: The danger in encouraging plurality is that you make it much easier for politicians to select the advice they like, because there is almost certain...

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Daniel Ellsberg on Donald Trump and The Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg. Bravest of the brave. Never give in. Never give up.  [embedded content][embedded content] Advertisements

Study shows higher minimum wages work  [embedded content] Advertisements

Is economics — really — a science? As yours truly has reported repeatedly during the last couple of years, economics students all over Europe and the U.S. are increasingly questioning if the kind of economics they are taught — mainstream neoclassical economics — is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics really is a science. My own take on the issue is that economics has lost immensely in terms of status and prestige during the last...

The minimum wage myth  [embedded content] Lo and behold! But of course — when facts and theory don’t agree, it’s the facts that have to be wrong … Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence,...

Where modern macroeconomics went wrong In the latest issue of Oxford Review of Economic Policy (Volume 34, Issue 1-2, 2018) the editors have invited some well-known contemporary mainstream macroeconomists​ (including e.g. Simon Wren-Lewis, Randall Wright, Olivier Blanchard, Ricardo Reis, Joseph Stiglitz) to give their views on how to rebuild macroeconomic theory for the future. Some of the contributions are interesting to read. Others — like Wren-Lewis and...

Time for another crash? On Black Friday 1929 market fundamentalist wet dreams of eternal growth took a serious hit. The stock market bubble exploded and crashed. Today​ we have a stock market situation much reminding of that in 1929. The Shiller P/E ratio is now even higher than that year. Those of us who know our Keynes-Fisher-Kindleberger-Minsky and have not completely forgotten all about economic​ history are starting to worry …...