Lars P. Syll

On the importance of blogging  

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes … I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of income and wealth, but not for such large disparities as exist to-day. John Maynard Keynes wrote this in General Theory (1936). Four decades later the Iron Lady appeared in the Parliament with this gobsmacking...

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RCT — no guide to the future To see what RCTs show, let me define the Cartesian product of X2, X3, . . . , Xn by Z. What RCTs show is that there exists some z ∈ Z, such that if we have the world in state (x, z) ∈ X instead of (y, z) ∈ X, the world in the next period will be in state a ∈ X instead of state b ∈ X. This is like saying, other things being the same (that is, z), if you vaccinate people, in the next period, there will be no influenza. But if you do not vaccinate them, there will...

Labor-cost competitiveness and the Eurozone — a textbook fairytale Heiner Flassbeck and Costas Lapavitsas spell out their version of what is roughly the neoclassical textbook model of a currency union. Their main point is that there would not have been large unsustainable current account imbalances within the Eurozone, and consequently no sovereign debt crisis in the deficit countries, if all member states had kept their nominal wage growth equal to labor productivity growth plus 2% (the...

If the centuries-old struggle with the problem of finding an analytical definition of probability has produced only endless controversies between the various doctrines, it is, in my opinion, because too little attention has been paid to the singular notion of random. For the dialectical root, in fact, lies in this notion: probability is only an arithmetical aspect of it. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen Modern probabilistic econometrics relies on the notion of probability. To at all be amenable...

BBC report on the need for rethinking economics and the way we teach it.

Time — a question of life and death It is thus seen that the time-dimension is completely ignored in spite of its crucial role in problems of this sort. For let us assume, for example, that the probability of some event E in a stochastic structure of outcomes is 1/10 000. Small though this probability is, there is a very high probability, 1-1/10000000000, that E should occur at least once in 230 000 outcomes. Now, if one outcome occurs every second, we need be willing to wait only three...

These brothers and sisters of mine 5 million Syrians are refugees. [embedded content] Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’...