Lars P. Syll

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...

Poverty — the Dumb and Dumber version A few years ago, two economics professors, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, published a paper, “The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development,” that drew inferences about poverty and genetics based on a statistical pattern … When the paper by Ashraf and Galor came out, I criticized it from a statistical perspective, questioning what I considered its overreach in making...

How to do econometrics properly Always, but always, plot your data. Remember that data quality is at least as important as data quantity. Always ask yourself, “Do these results make economic/common sense”? Check whether your “statistically significant” results are also “numerically/economically significant”. Be sure that you know exactly what assumptions are used/needed to obtain the results relating to the properties of any estimator or test that you...

Quand on n’a que l’amour [embedded content] Une grande chanson d’espoir qui touche mon cœur toujours.

Public debt and economic growth Towering debts, rapidly rising taxes, constant and expensive wars, a debt burden surpassing 200% of GDP. What are the chances that a country with such characteristics would grow rapidly? Almost anyone would probably say ‘none’. And yet, these are exactly the conditions under which the Industrial Revolution took place in Britain. Britain’s government debt went from 5% of GDP in 1700 to over 200% in 1820, it fought a war in one...

The golden rule of public debt Nation states borrow to provide public capital: For example, rail networks, road systems, airports and bridges. These are examples of large expenditure items that are more efficiently provided by government than by private companies. The benefits of public capital expenditures are enjoyed not only by the current generation of people, who must sacrifice consumption to pay for them, but also by future generations who will travel...

 [embedded content]

Take your epsilon and shove it! Given that a normative theory is defined as a theory prescribing how a rational agent should act, neoclassical economic theory certainly has to be considered a normative theory. The problem is — besides that it standardly assumes not only rationality and selfishness, but also e. g. common knowledge of people’s utility functions — that loads of research show that people almost never act in accordance with the theory: There is...

The inequality gap — five sickening facts 1 Just eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity. Although some of them have earned their fortune through talent or hard work, over half the world’s billionaires either inherited their wealth or accumulated it through industries prone to corruption and cronyism. 2 Seven out of 10 people live in a country that has seen a rise in inequality in the last 30 years. 3...