Lars P. Syll

The man who crushed the mathematical dream Gödel’s incompleteness theorems raise important questions about the foundations of mathematics. The most important concerns the question of how to select the specific systems of axioms that mathematics are supposed to be founded on. Gödel’s theorems irrevocably show that no matter what system is chosen, there will always have to be other axioms to prove previously unproved truths. This, of course, ought to be of...

To be a good economist one cannot only be an economist  [embedded content] The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts …. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the...

Always on my mind  [embedded content] Advertisements

Why Krugman and Stiglitz are no real alternatives to mainstream economics Little in the discipline has changed in the wake of the crisis. Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition — those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though Krugman and Stiglitz have...

When one look says it all  [embedded content] Advertisements

Monte Carlo simulation on p-values (wonkish) In many social sciences p values and null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) are often used to draw far-reaching scientific conclusions – despite the fact that they are as a rule poorly understood and that there exist altenatives that are easier to understand and more informative. Not the least using confidence intervals (CIs) and effect sizes are to be preferred to the Neyman-Pearson-Fisher mishmash approach...

Neoliberalism and mainstream economics Oxford professor Simon Wren-Lewis isn’t pleased with heterodox attacks on mainstream economics. One of the reasons is that he doesn’t share the heterodox view that mainstream economics and neoliberal ideas are highly linked. In a post on his blog, Wren-Lewis defends the mainstream economics establishment against critique waged against it by Phil Mirowski: Mirowski overestimates the extent to which neoliberal ideas have...

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...