Lars P. Syll

Krugman — self-protectionist free trader Krugman has been a booster of trade and globalization for thirty years: marginally more restrained than other elite economists, but still a booster. Now, the political establishment has what it wanted and the effects have been disastrous for those not in the top 20 percent of the income distribution. At this stage, as exemplified by Krugman, the economics elite is moving to reinvent itself with a combination of minor backpedaling and its own studies...

To my sons and daughters (personal)  [embedded content] I can, I can, I can This one is for you — David, Tora, Linnea, Amanda, and Sebastian

To be absolutely clear, what Sonnenschein (1972), Mantel (1974), and Debreu (1974) showed is that there is no hope of a general result for stability, since the only conditions on the aggregate excess demand function that can be derived from even the strongest form of the assumptions on individual preferences are the well‐known four: continuity, Walras’s law, homogeneity of degree zero, and boundary conditions that guarantee that aggregate excess demand “explodes” if any price goes to...

Does free trade — really — make us richer?  [embedded content] Another obstruction comes from the mainstream economics profession that strongly influences public understanding of and discourse about globalization. The economics profession has been a gung-ho supporter of neoliberal globalization, using the rhetoric of free trade. It advocated the policies of the Washington Consensus that were implemented by the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s, and it remains one-hundred percent...

 [embedded content] I loved this album forty years ago. I still do. This one is for you, Jeanette Meyer.

A man doesn’t live by rock ‘n’ roll and brew alone  [embedded content]

To a mainstream economist, theory means model, and model means ideas expressed in mathematical form … These models, students learn, are theory … Students also learn that the legitimate way to argue is with models and econometrically constructed forms of evidence … Because all models are incomplete, students also learn that no model is perfect. Indeed, students learn that it is bad manners to engage in excessive questioning of simplifying assumptions. Claiming that a model is deficient is...

Modern economics is sick Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing. To pick up a copy of The American Economic Review or The Economic Journal these days is to wonder whether one has landed on a strange...

Who could be against allowing people their ‘just deserts?’ But there is that matter of what is ‘just.’ Most serious ethical thinkers distinguish between deservingness and happenstance. Deservingness has to be rigorously earned. You do not ‘deserve’ that part of your income that comes from your parents’ wealth or connections or, for that matter, their DNA. You may be born just plain gorgeous or smart or tall, and those characteristics add to the market value of your marginal product, but...

Experimentelle Ökonomik — Versuch auf der wissenschaftlichen Leiche zu leben In jedem Fall, gilt dass das Verhaltensmodell eines HOM (Homo oeconomicus) realwissenschaftlich widerlegt ist. Denn auch, wenn sich aufgrund der Systemeigenschaften ein Verhalten einstellen sollte, das so wirkt, als ob ein Homo oeconomicus im klassischen Sinne am Werk wäre, so steckt dieser gerade nicht dahinter. Selbst wenn die Beobachtungs-ergebnisse dem, was nach dem HOM ebenfalls zu erwarten gewesen wäre,...