Lars P. Syll

Noah Smith — confusing mathematical masturbation with intercourse between research and reality There’s no question that mainstream academic macroeconomics failed pretty spectacularly in 2008 … Many among the heterodox would have us believe that their paradigm worked perfectly well in 2008 and after … This is dramatically overselling the product. First, heterodox models didn’t “predict” the crisis in the sense of an actual quantitative forecast. This is...

Serious academics are full of shit These fun-hating, highfalutin’ smarties have fought to maintain an exclusive and exclusionary scholastic environment since the first Ivory Towers were built … I may be a blogger/reporter/writer/occasional internet loudmouth today, but I also identify as a scientist, and to some degree as a serious academic. What that doesn’t make me is smarter, or more important, or more deserving of respect, than you. What that doesn’t...

On tour again (personal) Guest appearance in Hamburg again.’The Venice of the North’ is today as hip and hot as Berlin. Regular blogging will be resumed next weekend. [embedded content]

On the persistence of science-fiction economics Obscurantism is sustained by the self-interest of non-obscurantist scholars. To be effective, an attack on obscurantism has to be well documented and well argued. Mere diatribes are pointless and sometimes counterproductive. Yet scholars have a greater personal interest in achieving positive results than in exposing the flaws of others, not only because of the reward system of science, but also because...

Representative agent models and the streetlight effect Attempts to rationalize representative consumer models (especially for purposes other than social welfare measurement) may seem like a quixotic endeavor. Macroeconomists (and many applied microeconomists and econometricians) routinely assume the existence of one, seeing it as a necessary (though acceptable) evil required for the sake of tractability. Many mathematical economists are unwilling to accept...

Sverige är en liberal demokrati. Utöver lagarna måste alla här respektera demokrati och mänskliga rättigheter som yttrandefrihet och åsiktsfrihet, jämlikhet och jämställdhet och allas rätt att välja sitt liv – partner, karriär, livsstil. Inget märkligt och ändå så stort att det svindlar. Utanför denna kärna får var och en fritt välja sjal eller kippa, tillbe sin gud eller låta bli, äta fläsk och brännvin eller slippa, fira jul eller newroz … Moralens självutnämnda väktare i...

‘Som ett rastlöst barn om våren’ (personal)  [embedded content] En sång lika stor som livet självt. Oändligt vacker.

Economic modeling — nothing but obscurantist bullshit In the present article I consider the less frequently phenomenon of “hard obscurantism”, a species of the genus scholarly obscurantism. In academic debates, a more common term for obscurantism is “bullshit” … One may perhaps, distinguish between obscure writers and obscurantist writers. The former aim at truth, but do not respect the norms for arriving at truth, such as focusing on causality, acting as...

The best clue to a nation’s growth potential The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but — even worse — to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment … To be sure, any society will have its achievers no matter...

The power of simple models … The need for coworker interaction explains the existence of a common workweek, but not why that workweek is 40 hours long instead of 30. This is the question that the economic model of labor supply really helps us to answer. The model says that the workweek is 40 hours long because, on the average, that’s how long workers want it to be. If most people found an extra hour of leisure much more valuable than an extra hour’s wage,...