Lars P. Syll

One of my favourite books Well, sort of, at least. For those of us who can’t get enough of English eccentrics, Brewer’s Rogues, Villains, Eccentrics by William Donaldson is probably the funniest book ever written. I mean, just to take one example, where else would you find an entry like this one? Carlton, Sydney (1949- ), painter and decorator. Those who argue that bestiality should be treated with understanding had a setback in 1998 when Carlton, a married...

Beating a dead horse If I ask myself what I could legitimately assume a person to have rational expectations about, the technical answer would be, I think, about the realization of a stationary stochastic process, such as the outcome of the toss of a coin or anything that can be modeled as the outcome of a random process that is stationary. I don’t think that the economic implications of the outbreak of World war II were regarded by most people as the...

Feynman’s trick and Leibniz rule (student stuff) In his autobiography Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman among other things discussed his box of tools, and mentioned a wonderful little tool  by which he was able to differentiate under the integral sign more easily than by the methods usually taught at our universities: [embedded content] The more standard procedure is well described here: [embedded content] Advertisements...

What can economists know? The early concerns voiced by such critics as Keynes and Hayek, while they may indeed have been exaggerated, were not misplaced. I believe that much of the difficulty economists have encountered over the past fifty years can be traced to the fact that the economic environment we seek to model are sometimes too messy to be fitted into the mold of a well-behaved, complete model of the standard kind. It is not generally the case that...

[embedded content] This one is in loving memory of Kristina, beloved wife and mother of David and Tora. 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

The Euler-Lagrange equation (student stuff)  [embedded content] Excellent lecture! Advertisements

Factor analysis — like telling time with a stopped clock Exploratory factor analysis exploits correlations to summarize data, and confirmatory factor analysis — stuff like testing that the right partial correlations vanish — is a prudent way of checking whether a model with latent variables could possibly be right. What the modern g-mongers do, however, is try to use exploratory factor analysis to uncover hidden causal structures. I am very, very interested...

Reasons to reject the standard rationality axioms in economics Those axioms—and you can find a whole series of people from Pareto onwards who make the same argument—come from economists’ introspection and what they think is necessary for their work, not from observation of what people are doing. Some of these axioms seem natural, at least at first sight. For example, transitivity seems a natural idea—if you prefer A to B and B to C, you also prefer A to C....

Edward Snowden — unbroken and unconquerable [embedded content] This one is for you. Bravest of the brave. Never give in. Never give up. Advertisements

Modern macroeconomics — a walk down a blind alley I would say that macroeconomic theory has gone down a blind alley in the sense that we have locked onto a particular model: general equilibrium. But it is not really general equilibrium, I mean, it is a one-man model! In particular, it has become mathematically sophisticated without representing the fundamental features of the macro-economy. So I would say that people like Kydland and Prescott, and so forth,...