Lars P. Syll

I’ve received several thoughtful responses from economists I respect, all making a particular argument about the effects of Brexit-induced uncertainty. It goes like this: right now, firms don’t know how closely Britain will be tied to Europe, so it makes sense for them to postpone investments until the situation clarifies … Doesn’t this argument suggest essentially the same effects from any policy negotiation whose end result isn’t known? Why don’t we say that the...

The talismanic worship of mathematics in economics Ultimately, the problem isn’t with worshipping models of the stars, but rather with uncritical worship of the language used to model them, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in economics … Right now … there is widespread bias in favour of using mathematics. The success of math-heavy disciplines such as physics and chemistry has granted mathematical formulas with decisive authoritative force. Lord...

 [embedded content]

Dann sind wir Helden  [embedded content]

Mainstream economics — a pointless waste of time Paul Krugman has a piece up on his blog arguing that the ‘discipline of modeling’ is a sine qua non for tackling politically and emotionally charged economic issues: You might say that the way to go about research is to approach issues with a pure heart and mind: seek the truth, and derive any policy conclusions afterwards. But that, I suspect, is rarely how things work. After all, the reason you study an...

Why people have no faith in economics anymore In recent years the public has lost faith the in the economics profession. One reason for the lack of faith is the failure to predict the Great Recession, but the public’s dismissal of macroeconomists is based upon more than the failure to foresee the dangers the housing bubble posed for the economy. It is also due to false promises about the benefits to the working class from globalization, tax cuts for the...

People who have their heads fuddled with nonsense The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is “rash” to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period, is crazily improbable – the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years … Our main task, therefore, will...

 [embedded content]

Brexit shows the need for a reformed economics Brexit is about much more than frustration about the E.U. and immigration. It is about a shortage of decent and secure jobs; an impossibly precarious labour market; inexplicable inequalities in incomes and wealth; closed access to affordable education, and a terrible deficiency of affordable housing; and it is about British Chancellor of the Exchequer Osborne’s single-minded austerity economics and the...

What Brexit was all about      Societies where we allow the inequality of incomes and wealth to increase without bounds, sooner or later implode. In a market economy it is money that counts. In a democracy it is your vote that counts. If you’ve got money, you vote in. If you haven’t got money, you vote out.