Lars P. Syll

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...

Science and the quest for truth In my view, scientific theories are not to be considered ‘true’ or ‘false.’ In constructing such a theory, we are not trying to get at the truth, or even to approximate to it: rather, we are trying to organize our thoughts and observations in a useful manner. Robert Aumann What a handy view of science. How reassuring for all of you who have always thought that believing in the tooth fairy make you understand what happens to...

Marx and Keynes on the contradictions of capitalism Each capitalist, Marx noted, has an ambiguous relation to the workers. On the one hand, she wants the workers she employs to have low wages, since that makes for high profits. On the other hand, she wants all other workers to have high wages, since that makes for high demand for her products. Although it is possible for any one capitalist to have both desires satisfied, it is logically impossible for this...

Flight From The City  [embedded content] Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969 – 2018)  R.I.P. Advertisements

The future — something we know very little about All these pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-panelled Board Room and a nicely regulated market, are liable to collapse. At all times the vague panic fears and equally vague and unreasoned hopes are not really lulled, and lie but a little way below the surface. Perhaps the reader feels that this general, philosophical disquisition on the behavior of mankind is somewhat remote from the economic theory...

Poland’s Law and Justice — now and then A new law passed by Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party and signed by President Andrzej Duda on Feb. 6, means that you may end up in prison for three years if you “publicly and against the facts attribute to the Polish nation or the Polish state responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich.” The Polish Parliament ordered a new investigation into the Jedwabne atrocity in...

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Assume you’re a Bayesian turkey and hold a nonzero probability belief in the hypothesis H that “people are nice vegetarians that do not eat turkeys and that every day I see the sun rise confirms my belief.” For every day you survive, you update your belief according to Bayes’ Rule P(H|e) = [P(e|H)P(H)]/P(e), where evidence e stands for “not being eaten” and P(e|H) = 1. Given that there do exist other hypotheses than H, P(e) is less than 1 and so P(H|e) is greater than P(H)....

Economics education — teaching cohorts after cohorts of students useless theories Nowadays there is almost no place whatsoever in economics education for courses in the history of economic thought and economic methodology. This is deeply worrying. A science that doesn’t self-reflect and asks important methodological and science-theoretical questions about the own activity, is a science in dire straits. How did we end up in this sad state? Philip Mirowski...