Lars P. Syll

Game theory and the shaping of neoliberal capitalism Neoliberal subjectivity arises from the intricate pedagogy of game theory that comes to the fore in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and is interchangeable with contemporary paradigmatic instrumental rationality. Rational choice is promoted as an exhaustive science of decision making, but only by smuggling in a characteristic​ confusion​ suggesting​ that everything of value​ to agents can be reflected in...

Missing the point — the quantitative ambitions of DSGE models A typical modern approach to writing a paper in DSGE macroeconomics is as follows: o to establish “stylized facts” about the quantitative interrelationships of certain macroeconomic variables (e.g. moments of the data such as variances, autocorrelations, covariances, …) that have hitherto not been jointly explained; o to write down a DSGE model of an economy subject to a defined set of shocks...

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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