Lars P. Syll

How to crush mainstream economics professors in debates  [embedded content] A must-see! And with a lesson to learn: being pompous and arrogant is of no avail when debating with smart and knowledgeable students … div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements

How to filter obscurantist nonsense economics Following the greatest economic depression since the 1930s, Robert Solow in 2010 gave a prepared statement on “Building a Science of Economics for the Real World” for a hearing in the U. S. Congress. According to Solow modern macroeconomics has not only failed at solving present economic and financial problems, but is “bound” to fail. Building microfounded macromodels on “assuming the economy populated by a...

Jon Elster on mainstream economics — obscurant bullshit In the present article I consider the less frequently phenomenon of “hard obscurantism”, a species of the genus scholarly obscurantism. In academic debates, a more common term for obscurantism is “bullshit” … One may perhaps, distinguish between obscure writers and obscurantist writers. The former aim at truth, but do not respect the norms for arriving at truth, such as focusing on causality, acting as...

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

Why not even Paul Krugman is a real Keynesian Keynes’s insights have enormous practical importance, according to Lance Taylor and Duncan Foley … But isn’t Keynes now mainstream? No, say Foley and Taylor. The mainstream still sees economies as inherently moving to an optimal equilibrium … It still says demand causes short-run fluctuations, but only supply factors, such as the capital stock and technology, can affect long-run growth. EVEN PAUL KRUGMAN, a...

Understanding the limits of statistical inference  [embedded content] This is indeed an instructive video on what statistical inference is all about. But we have to remember that economics and statistics are two quite different things, and as long as economists cannot identify their statistical theories with real-world phenomena there is no real warrant for taking their statistical inferences seriously. Just as there is no such thing as a ‘free lunch,’...

Principal agent problems and incentive pay schemes If bonus or “incentive pay” schemes work so well for senior executives and bankers, why does everyone not get them? The conventional answer is that a bonus scheme or incentive plan will indeed encourage the recipients to make more money for the shareholders or clients on whose behalf they act … A classic paper on the “principal-agent problem” … by Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom pointed out that the...

 [embedded content] Besides illustrating that it is simply not a good description of how we make inferences in science to assume that non-black armchairs confirm the hypothesis that all ravens are black, Hempel’s paradox — at least in my reading of it — makes a good argument for a causal account of confirmation of empirical generalizations. Contrary to positivist theories of confirmation, the paradox shows that to have a good explanation in sciences, we have to make...

Mainstream economics is perfectly correct — and totally useless A balloonist, lost, sees someone walking down a country lane. The balloonist lowers the balloon and shouts down to the the walker: — Where am I? — About 20 feet above the ground, comes the reply. After a moment’s pondering, the balloonist says: — You must be an economist. — How did you know? — Your information is perfectly correct — and totally useless. Timothy Brennan...

Is Robert Lucas a Keynesian? In his Keynote Address to the 2003 History of Political Economy Conference, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas said: Well, I’m not here to tell people in this group about the history of monetary thought. I guess I’m here as a kind of witness from a vanished culture, the heyday of Keynesian economics. My credentials? Was I a Keynesian myself? Absolutely … I thought when I was trying to prepare some notes for this talk that people...