Lars P. Syll

The Victims of Game Theory Imagine you and someone you do not know can share $100. It is up to you to propose how to divide the $100 between the two of you, and the other player will need to accept or reject your proposal. If he rejects the proposal, neither of you will receive anything. What sum will you offer the other player? I have data on the choices of about 12,300 people, most of them students, who were asked this question. Nearly half of the...

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He was my brother (personal)  [embedded content] In loving memory of my brother Peter People say time heals all wounds. I wish that was true. But some wounds never heal — you just learn to live with the scars. But in dreams, I can hear your name. And in dreams, We will meet again. When the seas and mountains fall And we come to end of days, In the dark I hear a call Calling me there I will go there And back again. Advertisements...

Trumped-up trickle-down tax cuts Who would have thought that Lafferian supply-side economics and ‘trickle-down’ horseshit would be resurrected? Yours truly, for one, thought we had buried those zombies for good. Trump and the GOP thought otherwise and have now decided to give wealthy business owners and corporate shareholders an early Christmas gift this year … Advertisements

This book reflects my debate with myself​ about economic theory. On the one hand, I am captivated by the charm of formal models: tales emerge from the formal symbols, and these tales have almost miraculous powers over me. On the other hand, I am obsessively occupied with denying any interpretation​ contending that economic models produce conclusions of real value. I feel attracted to economics as a branch of philosophy and as an academic field in which an intelligent...

Mainstream economics — an obscurantist waste of time One may perhaps, distinguish between obscure writers and obscurantist writers. The former aim at truth, but do not respect the norms for arriving at truth, such as focusing on causality, acting as the Devil’s Advocate, and generating falsifiable hypotheses. The latter do not aim at truth, and often scorn the very idea that there is such a thing as the truth … The authors I have singled out are far from...

The real harm done by Bayesianism The bias toward the superficial and the response to extraneous influences on research are both examples of real harm done in contemporary social science by a roughly Bayesian paradigm of statistical inference as the epitome of empirical argument. For instance the dominant attitude toward the sources of black-white differential in United States unemployment rates (routinely the rates are in a two to one ratio) is...

The first speculative bubble  [embedded content] Advertisements

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Chicago economics delirium VSOP Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s (sic!), as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical...