Lars P. Syll

Why reading newspapers makes you stupid Lydon: You say newspapers make us stupid, and I’m not quite clear why. Taleb: Because they always give you an explanation to events so that you have the feeling that you know what’s going on. They tell you the stock market went down, because of fear of a recession, and that’s false causation with uncertainty there. They check their facts, but you can’t check their causes. So, you have the feeling of over-causation...

Uncertainty and the pretty, polite techniques of economics All these pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-panelled Board Room and a nicely regulated market, are liable to collapse. At all times the vague panic fears and equally vague and unreasoned hopes are not really lulled, and lie but a little way below the surface. Perhaps the reader feels that this general, philosophical disquisition on the behavior of mankind is somewhat remote from the...

A Swedish giant has left us Sad, sad, sad, news reached us today. One of Sweden’s greatest actors ever — Björn Granath — passed away today, aged 70. He made many great performances, but the one that has stayed with me more than any other is the portrait of the rebel Erik in Pelle the Conqueror (1987). [embedded content] “We’ll set out and conquer the world.”

Why economists don’t know what every baby knows about scientific methods Limiting model assumptions in economic science always have to be closely examined since if we are going to be able to show that the mechanisms or causes that we isolate and handle in our models are stable in the sense that they do not change when we “export” them to our “target systems”, we have to be able to show that they do not only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and a...

Die Mauer ist weg  [embedded content] Anything you can say about the Berlin Wall is — to paraphrase one of my intellectual heroes — at the same time both too much and not enough.

Proving 0 = 1  [embedded content]

True face of Marine Le Pen  [embedded content]

Dick Harrison — rätt för en gångs skull Dick Harrison är en tyckmyckentrutad, pompös,och mediekåt professorskollega för vilken jag har hyser en nästintill obefintlig uppskattning. Men här — i Eric Schüldts fina SVT programserie Idévärlden — har han helt rätt i sin beskrivning av dagens anti-bildningselände i svensk universitetsvärld. Bra rutet Dick!

Alternative facts — the latest Newspeak invention The US is today run by a president that thinks he can get away with never ending lies by simply calling them ” alternative facts.” That’s of course nothing but Orwellian Newspeak — and George Orwell himself described the dangers of this postmodern mumbo jumbo truth-relativism already seventy-five years ago: I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe...

RBC models — nonsense on stilts They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and inertia they find objectionable in other theories of business fluctuations … I try to point out how incapable the new equilibrium business cycles models are of explaining the most obvious observed facts of...