Lars P. Syll

Inför brexit-omröstningen var det få kommentatorer som ondgjorde sig över att man i Storbritannien valt att låta medborgarna i en folkomröstning tala om huruvida man ville stanna kvar i EU eller ej. För de flesta framstod detta lika självklart som att Sverige för lite mer än tio år sedan folkomröstade om vi ville vara med i EMU eller ej. Men när väl det — för de flesta — överraskande resultatet av brexit-omröstningen stod klart blev det andra tongångar. När ‘folket’ inte valde...

L’urne que nous interrogeons In my judgment, the practical usefulness of those modes of inference, here termed Universal and Statistical Induction, on the validity of which the boasted knowledge of modern science depends, can only exist—and I do not now pause to inquire again whether such an argument must be circular—if the universe of phenomena does in fact present those peculiar characteristics of atomism and limited variety which appear more and more...

Touring Germany yours truly also had time to visit son completing law studies at Heidelberg University. Amazingly beautiful town.

Almost a century and a half after Léon Walras founded neoclassical general equilibrium theory, economists still have not been able to show that markets move economies to equilibria. What we do know is that — under very restrictive assumptions — unique Pareto-efficient equilibria do exist. But what good does that do? As long as we cannot show, except under exceedingly unrealistic assumptions, that there are convincing reasons to suppose there are forces which lead economies to...

Axel Leijonhufvud on why economics has become so boring [embedded content]Trying to delineate the difference between ‘New Keynesianism’ and ‘Post Keynesianism’ — during an interview a couple of months ago — yours truly was confronted by the odd and confused view that Axel Leijonhufvud was a ‘New Keynesian.’ I wasn’t totally surprised — I had run into that misapprehension before — but still, it’s strange how wrong people sometimes get things. The  last time...

How Richard Posner became a Keynesian Until [2008], when the banking industry came crashing down and depression loomed for the first time in my lifetime, I had never thought to read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, despite my interest in economics … I had heard that it was a very difficult book and that the book had been refuted by Milton Friedman, though he admired Keynes’s earlier work on monetarism. I would not have been surprised...

Si dolce è il tormento  [embedded content]

Pastoral in the Forest  [embedded content]

Krugman’s dangerous lack of methodological reflection How do we do useful economics? This is an important question that every earnest economist ought to pose — and try to answer. Here’s one answer, from Nobel laureate Paul Krugman: In general, what we really do is combine maximization-and-equilibrium as a first cut with a variety of ad hoc modifications reflecting what seem to be empirical regularities about how both individual behavior and markets depart...

The truth about banks When faced with the Great Recession in 2008, macroeconomics was initially unprepared to contribute much to the analysis of the interaction of banks with the macro economy. Today there is a sizable body of research on this topic, but the literature still has many difficulties … In modern neoclassical intermediation of loanable funds theories, banks are seen as intermediating real savings. Lending, in this narrative, starts with banks...