Lars P. Syll

Methodology — the main problem with mainstream economics The basic problems mostly originate at the level of methodology, and in particular with the current emphasis on methods of mathematical modelling. The latter emphasis is an error given the lack of match of the methods in question to the conditions in which they are applied. So long as the critical focus remains only, or even mainly or centrally, at the level of substantive economic theory and/or...

Top 25 Heterodox Economics Books Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867) Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (1911) Nikolai Kondratiev, The Major Economic Cycles (1925) Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (1930) John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory (1936) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) Paul Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development...

Keynes and Ramsey on probability .[embedded content] Although Blackburn on the whole gives a succinct and correct picture of Keynes’s view on probability, I think it’s necessary to somewhat qualify in what way and to what extent Keynes “lost” the debate with Frank Ramsey. In economics, it’s an indubitable fact that few mainstream neoclassical economists work within the Keynesian paradigm. All more or less subscribe to some variant of Bayesianism. And some...

Elever på fristående gymnasieskolor får högre betyg utan högre faktiska kunskaper och får därför orättvist större möjligheter att studera vidare än elever på kommunala gymnasieskolor. I SVT:s Agenda diskuterades ikväll att det trots två decennier av rapporter om orättvisa betyg så fortsätter problemet år efter år. Ingenting händer och utbildningsminister Mats Persson (L) hade inget annat att komma med för att råda bot på rättsosäkra inflaterade betyg än att en utredning är...

Echte Frauen und AfD .[embedded content] Herr Krah ist offensichtlich ein Mann, der Pech hat, wenn er versucht zu denken …

Austrian economics — a methodological critique .[embedded content] This is a fair presentation and critique of Austrian methodology. But beware! In theoretical and methodological questions it is not always either-or. We have to be open-minded and pluralistic enough not to throw out the baby with the bath water — and fail to secure insights like this: What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? … If we possess all...

Angus Deaton rethinking economics Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly...

Ideology and the politics of economic method Political economy has long taken a keen interest in the politics of economic ideas, but considerably less attention has been paid to the politics of economic method. Method gets neglected as the technical realm within which, it is assumed economic ideas, once established, are implemented in straightforward fashion. In fact, economic method and technique are in fact key sites in the battle of economic ideas …...

I heard there’s some good shit on TV tonight … Time is a scarce resource on television. However, if one still — as is so often the case nowadays — uses precious airtime for trivial matters and meaningless ‘entertainment,’ there must be a reason. Television is — still — for a large part of the population one of the primary sources of information and worldview. Thus, filling program schedules with trivialities becomes an effective means to — instead of...

‘New Keynesian’ unemployment — a paid vacation essentially! Franco Modigliani famously quipped that he did not think that unemployment during the Great Depression should be described, in an economic model, as a “sudden bout of contagious laziness”. Quite. For the past thirty years we have been debating whether to use classical real business cycle models (RBC), or their close cousins, modern New Keynesian (NK) models, to describe recessions. In both of these...