Lars P. Syll

Cherry picking economic models Chameleons arise and are often nurtured by the following dynamic. First a bookshelf model is constructed that involves terms and elements that seem to have some relation to the real world and assumptions that are not so unrealistic that they would be dismissed out of hand. The intention of the author, let’s call him or her “Q,” in developing the model may to say something about the real world or the goal may simply be to...

 [embedded content] Ja hur ska man reagera på dessa uttryck för oförblommerat svinaktig rasism? Kanske med att lyssna på Olof Palme [embedded content]

Why economists can’t reason Reasoning is the process whereby we get from old truths to new truths, from the known to the unknown, from the accepted to the debatable … If the reasoning starts on firm ground, and if it is itself sound, then it will lead to a conclusion which we must accept, though previously, perhaps, we had not thought we should. And those are the conditions that a good argument must meet; true premises and a good inference. If either of...

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How do we attach probabilities to the real world? Econometricians usually think that the data generating process (DGP) always can be modelled properly using a probability measure. The argument is standardly based on the assumption that the right sampling procedure ensures there will always be an appropriate probability measure. But – as always – one really has to argue the case, and present warranted evidence that real-world features are correctly described...

Küssen kann man nicht alleine  [embedded content]

Ich hab’ mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren (personal)

On probability distributions and uncertainty Almost a hundred years after John Maynard Keynes wrote his seminal A Treatise on Probability (1921), it is still very difficult to find economics textbooks that seriously try to incorporate his far-reaching and incisive analysis of induction and evidential weight. The standard view in mainstream economics – and the axiomatic probability theory underlying it – is to a large extent based on the rather simplistic...

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Economists of all shades have generally misunderstood the theoretical structure of Keynes’s The General Theory. Quite often this is a result of misunderstanding the concept of ‘effective demand’ — one of the key theoretical innovations of The General Theory. Jesper Jespersen untangles the concept and shows how Keynes, by taking uncertainty seriously, contributed to forming an analytical alternative to the prevailing neoclassical general equilibrium framework: Effective demand...