Lars P. Syll

Milton Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis — so wrong, so wrong Milton Friedman’s Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) says that people’s consumption isn’t affected by short-term fluctuations in incomes since people only spend more money when they think that their life-time incomes change. Believing Friedman is right, mainstream economists have for decades argued that Keynesian fiscal policies therefore are ineffectual. As shown over and over again for the...

I Want a President Just across the street from where I’m living, The Municipal Art Gallery has had Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President installed on its exterior for a couple of months now. “I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown … Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.“ Interesting art … div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u >...

Big Data — Poor Science Almost everything we do these days leaves some kind of data trace in some computer system somewhere. When such data is aggregated into huge databases it is called “Big Data”. It is claimed social science will be transformed by the application of computer processing and Big Data. The argument is that social science has, historically, been “theory rich” and “data poor” and now we will be able to apply the methods of “real science” to...

The government budget deficits obsession The obsession with government budget deficits since the crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession illustrates the damage done by mistaken economic ideas. In the rich West, tens of millions of people lost jobs that could have been saved … The media focused on the politics of the budget debate, but economic ideas had a central role in the outcome. Believers in Say’s law predominated … The most prominent research was...

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So what do I mean by methodological arrogance? I mean an attitude that invokes micro-foundations as a methodological principle — philosophical reductionism in Popper’s terminology — while dismissing non-microfounded macromodels as unscientific. To be sure, the progress of science may enable us to reformulate (and perhaps improve) explanations of certain higher-level phenomena by expressing those relationships in terms of lower-level concepts. That is what Popper calls...

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The philosophy of lying Something repellent clings to the lie, and though the consciousness of this was indeed beaten into one with the old whip, this simultaneously said something about the master of the dungeon. The mistake lies in all too much honesty. Whoever lies, is ashamed, because in every lie they must experience what is degrading in the existing state of the world … Such shame saps the energy of the lies of those who are more subtly organized....

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Galbraith’s History of Economic Thought  [embedded content] div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements