Lars P. Syll

Recently Brad DeLong has been flying his “neoliberal freak flag high” on his blog. And not that long ago Simon Wren-Lewis had a post up commenting on traction gaining “attacks on mainstream economics”: One frequent accusation … often repeated by heterodox economists, is that mainstream economics and neoliberal ideas are inextricably linked. Of course economics is used to support neoliberalism. Yet I find mainstream economics full of ideas and analysis that permits a wide ranging and deep...

In 1817 David Ricardo presented — in Principles — a theory that was meant to explain why countries trade and, based on the concept of opportunity cost, how the pattern of export and import was be ruled by countries exporting goods in which they had comparative advantage and importing goods in which they had comparatively less  disadvantage. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, however, didn’t explain why the comparative advantage was the way it was. In the beginning of the 20th...

Kjell-Olof Feldt erkänner — friskolereformen var fel – Jag vet inte hur vi tänkte, men det blev fel med valfriheten i skolan. Det säger nu tidigare S-finansministern Kjell-Olof Feldt till SVT. – Problemet är likvärdigheten, menar Kjell-Olof Feldt. De duktiga eleverna söker sig till samma skolor, det gör att de halvbra skolorna dräneras på bra elever, och dras ner till fler och fler problemskolor. Det måste dagens politiker våga sätta stopp för. Kjell-Olof Feldt var den kanske viktigaste...

The Danish Girl (personal) [embedded content] Totally heartbreaking — but also a wonderful and beautiful film about unconditional love.

The sad state of economics education Nowadays there is almost no place whatsoever in economics education for courses in the history of economic thought and economic methodology. This deeply worrying. A science that doesn’t self-reflect and ask important methodological and science-theoretical questions about the own activity, is a science in dire straits. How did we end up in this sad state? Philip Mirowski gives the following answer: After a brief flirtation in the 1960s and 1970s, the...

Free trade and the end of comparative advantage The classical theory of comparative advantage has driven US trade policy for the past fifty years. That policy, in combination with technical innovations that have lowered costs of transportation and communication, has opened the global economy. Yet paradoxically, this opening has rendered classical trade theory obsolete. That in turn has left the US economically vulnerable because its trade policy remains stuck in the past and based on ideas...

Statistics — a science in deep crisis As most of you are aware … there is a statistical crisis in science, most notably in social psychology research but also in other fields. For the past several years, top journals such as JPSP, Psych Science, and PPNAS have published lots of papers that have made strong claims based on weak evidence. Standard statistical practice is to take your data and work with it until you get a p-value of less than .05. Run a few experiments like that, attach them...

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...