Lars P. Syll

Dangers of ‘running with the mainstream pack’ [embedded content] An absolutely fabulous speech — and Soskice and Carlin’s textbook Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability, and the Financial System — that Dullien mentions at the beginning of his speech — is really a very good example of the problems you run into if you want to be ‘pluralist’ within the mainstream pack. Carlin and Soskice explicitly adapts a ‘New Keynesian’ framework including price...

Putting predictions to the test It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book that people who make prediction their business — people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables — are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off...

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Nights in White Satin  [embedded content] div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements

Economic growth and gender The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor​ and talent, but — even worse — to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment … To be sure, any society will have its achievers no matter what, if only...

Back in the 80’s yours truly had the pleasure of studying German at Universität Wien.  I’ve been back in Vienna a couple of times since then. A wonderful town full of history — and Kaffeehäuser! [embedded content] div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements

In his recent article on Where Modern Macroeconomics Went Wrong, Joseph Stiglitz acknowledges that his approach “and that of DSGE models begins with the same starting point: the competitive equilibrium model of Arrow and Debreu.” This is probably also the reason why Stiglitz’ critique doesn’t go far enough. It’s strange that mainstream macroeconomists still stick to a general equilibrium paradigm more than forty years after the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem — SMD —...

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Ett av Skolkommissionens övergripande förslag är att i skollagen ange att skolans huvudmän ska verka för en allsidig social sammansättning. Efter att ha konstaterat att utvecklingen mot ökade socioekonomiska skillnader mellan skolor är mycket oroande, avstyrker emellertid Skolverket förslaget. Orsaken är att det anses oklart vad ”allsidig social sammansättning” innebär. Det kan man anse, men då måste man också undra om inte även Skolverkets oro för ökade socioekonomiska...

Where modern macroeconomics went wrong DSGE models seem to take it as a religious tenet that consumption should be explained by a model of a representative agent maximizing his utility over an infinite lifetime without borrowing constraints. Doing so is called micro-founding the model. But economics is a behavioral science. If Keynes was right that individuals saved a constant fraction of their income, an aggregate model based on that assumption is...