Lars P. Syll

Paul Krugman has repeatedly over the years argued that we should continue to use mainstream economics hobby horses like IS-LM and AS-AD models. Here’s one example: So why do AS-AD? … We do want, somewhere along the way, to get across the notion of the self-correcting economy, the notion that in the long run, we may all be dead, but that we also have a tendency to return to full employment via price flexibility. Or to put it differently, you do want somehow to make clear the...

It’s now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was invented to disguise Eurocentric views that supported colonialism. When I first heard such claims some fifteen years ago, I thought they were so flimsy they’d soon disappear. For the claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn Enlightenment upside down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism, on the basis of...

Wokeism and the commodified academic industry .[embedded content]

The problem with identity politics and wokeism .[embedded content]

While appeal to R squared is a common rhetorical device, it is a very tenuous connection to any plausible explanatory virtues for many reasons. Either it is meant to be merely a measure of predictability in a given data set or it is a measure of causal influence. In either case it does not tell us much about explanatory power. Taken as a measure of predictive power, it is limited in that it predicts variances only. But what we mostly want to predict is levels, about which it...

Economic methodology — Lawson, Mäki, and Syll We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists. Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I would see their work as primarily analytical and my own as more critically constructive or...

Lönerna driver inte inflationen Stephanie Kelton har blivit en fixstjärna för vänstern och kritiker till gängse nationalekonomisk teori. I helgen besökte hon Stockholm. Hon är kritisk till hur inflationen bekämpas: ”Räntehöjningar är ett väldigt trubbigt verktyg” … Kelton besöker Stockholm mitt under en internationell inflationskris. Första frågan till henne under intervjun ett par timmar före hennes medverkan på konferensen blir därför hur inflationen...

Neo-classical economists getting their models to fit the data. pic.twitter.com/DxvmhR6eil — Rethinking Economics (@rethinkecon) May 20, 2023

Economic theory, like anthropology, ‘works’ by studying societies which are in some relevant sense simpler or more primitive than our own, in the hope either that relations that are important but hidden in our society will be laid bare in simpler ones, or that concrete evidence can be discovered for possibilities which are open to us which are without precedent in our own history. Unlike anthropologists, however, economists simply invent the primitive societies we study, a...

Postcolonial theory in perspective Many of the theoretical assumptions which support the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual movement they most despise. The best tenets of woke, such as the insistence on viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective, come straight from the Enlightenment. Contemporary rejections of this period usually go hand in hand with not much knowledge of it. But you can’t hope to make progress...