Lars P. Syll

The hazards of willfully ignoring uncertainty We forget – or willfully ignore – that our models are simplifications of the world … One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age … is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening. This syndrome is often associated with very precise-seeming predictions that are not at all accurate … This is like claiming...

Milton Friedman’s pet theory finally shown to be wrong Milton Friedman’s Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) says that people’s consumption isn’t affected by short-term fluctuations in incomes since people only spend more money when they think that their life-time incomes change. Believing Friedman is right, mainstream economists have for decades argued that Keynesian fiscal policies therefore are ineffectual. As shown over and over again for the last three...

‘Alternative facts’ and voter fraud  [embedded content] Oh, horrible, oh, horrible, most horrible! What a tragedy — and what shame, all those Americans with more than two brain cells must feel today. I do suffer with them through this nightmare.

Smoke on the water  [embedded content] The unsurpassed rock MASTERPIECE.

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In The World in the Model Mary Morgan characterizes the modelling tradition of economics as one concerned with “thin men acting in small worlds” and writes: Strangely perhaps, the most obvious element in the inference gap for models … lies in the validity of any inference between two such different media – forward from the real world to the artificial world of the mathematical model and back again from the model experiment to the real material of the economic world. The model...

Yours truly föreläser om nyliberalism Smålands Nation Kastanjegatan 7, Lund 2 februari kl. 18.00-20.00

Don’t let me be misunderstood  [embedded content]

Donald Trump’s running war on reality  [embedded content]

Trump and free trade Dear President Trump, Plenty of people will try to convince you that globalization and free trade could benefit everyone, if only the gains were more fairly shared … This belief is shared by almost all politicians in both parties, and it’s an article of faith for the economics profession. You are right to reject it … It’s a fallacy based on a fantasy, and it has been ever since David Ricardo dreamed up the idea of “Comparative Advantage...