Lars P. Syll

The wide conviction of the superiority of the methods of the science has converted the econometric community largely to a group of fundamentalist guards of mathematical rigour. It is often the case that mathemical rigour is held as the dominant goal and the criterion for research topic choice as well as research evaluation, so much so that the relevance of the research to business cycles is reduced to empirical illustrations. To that extent, probabilistic formalization has...

And one day there will be no more frontier (personal) [embedded content] In loving memory of my brother, Peter ‘Uncas’ Pålsson.

Statistical inference — a self-imposed limitation The tool of statistical inference becomes available as the result of a self-imposed limitation of the universe of discourse. It is assumed that the available observations have been generated by a probability law or stochastic process about which some incomplete knowledge is available a priori … It should be kept in mind that the sharpness and power of these remarkable tools of inductive reasoning are bought...

Economics — more like phrenology than physics What made phrenology so popular was what also made economics so popular at the time: it gave a rationale for a society based on Progress and also provided a blueprint for how this could be achieved. The phrenological doctrine, being so vague in its pronouncements, was highly malleable and could be used to justify whatever those in power needed justifying. So, for example, in 19th century England phrenology was...

My recent research with Carine Nourry and Alain Venditti argues that while there are strong reasons for believing there are no free lunches left uneaten by bonus-hungry market participants, there are really no reasons for believing that this will lead to Pareto efficiency, except, perhaps, by chance … In our model environment, booms and crashes occur simply as a consequence of the animal spirits of market participants. Why should we care if there are big movements in the...

Reality virus strikes economics! The WHO today warned of a virulent new virus affecting vulnerable groups in the Mid-West and Eastern USA. The outbreak, which began in the Mid-West’s extensive Great Lakes ‘Freshwater’ river system, has recently jumped the ‘Saltwater’ barrier, meaning that the entire population of its target species – ‘Mainstream’ economists – is now at risk. Speaking on behalf of the WHO, Dr Cahuc explained that the virus works by turning...

New Keynesianism — neither new nor Keynesian Maintaining that economics is a science in the ‘true knowledge’ business, I remain a skeptic of the pretences and aspirations of ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics. So far, I cannot really see that it has yielded very much in terms of realist and relevant economic knowledge. And there’s nothing new or Keynesian about it. ‘New Keynesianism’ doesn’t have its roots in Keynes. It has its intellectual roots in Paul...

A true Post Keynesian But these more recent writers like their predecessors were still dealing with a system in which the amount of the factors employed was given and the other relevant facts were known more or less for certain. This does not mean that they were dealing with a system in which change was ruled out, or even one in which the disappointment of expectation was ruled out. But at any given time facts and expectations were assumed to be given in a...

Unless you have a PhD in economics, you probably think it uncontroversial to argue that we should be concerned about the unemployment rate. Those of you who have lost a job, or who have struggled to find a job on leaving school, college, or a university, are well aware that unemployment is a painful and dehumanizing experience. You may be surprised to learn that, for the past thirty-five years, the models used by academic economists and central bankers to understand how the...

Are some people just unlucky when trying to think ?  [embedded content]