Lars P. Syll

Walrasian economic theory — little better than nonsense You enquire whether or not Walras was supposing that exchanges actually take place at the prices originally proposed when the prices are not equilibrium prices. The footnote which you quote convinces me that he assuredly supposed that they did not take place except at the equilibrium prices … All the same, I shall hope to convince you some day that Walras’ theory and all the others along those lines are little better than nonsense!...

Logistic regression (student stuff)  [embedded content] And in the video below (in Swedish) yours truly shows how to perform a logit regression using Gretl.[embedded content]

Pedagogik — ett ämne i kris Den antiintellektuella avgrunden är nära när den postmoderna sanningsrelativismen infekterar det offentliga samtalet på alla nivåer, inklusive den akademiska världen. I Sverige tycks den pedagogiska disciplinen vara värst smittad. En docent i pedagogik fick för några år sedan Skolverkets uppgift att skriva en rapport om fysikundervisningen i den svenska skolan, samt komma med förslag på hur den skulle attrahera fler flickor. Ur rapporten: ”Föreställningen om det...

There ain’t no cure  [embedded content]

Top 10 economics blog posts Dumb and dumber in modern macroeconomics Why Paul Krugman is no real Keynesian Dani Rodrik’s blind spot Robert Lucas, rational expectations, and the understanding of business cycles The blatant absence of empirical fit of macroeconomic models Non-ergodic economics, expected utility and the Kelly criterion Greg Mankiw makes a fool of himself — again Is macroeconomics for real? Please say after me – Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu James Heckman — the ultimate take down...

This one is for you — all you brothers and sisters, struggling to survive in civil wars, or forced to flee your homes, risking your lives on your way to my country — Sweden — or other countries in Europe. May God be with you. [embedded content]

‘New Keynesianism’ — an unpleasant macroeconomic fairy-tale The so-called new-Keynesian (or NK) model, has emerged and become a workhorse for policy and welfare analysis … The model starts from the RBC model without capital, and, in its basic incarnation, adds only two imperfections. It introduces monopolistic competition in the goods market. The reason is clear: If the economy is going to have price setters, they better have some monopoly power. It then introduces discrete nominal price...

Wren-Lewis on the New Classical Counter Revolution Simon Wren-Lewis argues in a new paper — Unravelling the New Classical Counter Revolution — that it is essential to understand the success of the New Classical Counter Revolution (NCCR), if we are going to be able to position Keynes’s  General Theory today. Writes Wren-Lewis: One other undoubted appeal that the NCCR had was that it allowed macroeconomics to be brought back under the microeconomics umbrella. New Keynesian economists can...

Georgescu-Roegen on why ‘most of the time all of us talk some nonsense’ Positivism does not seem to realize at all that the concept of verifiability — or that the position that ‘the meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification’ — is covered by a dialectical penumbra in spite of the apparent rigor of the sentences used in the argument … I hope the reader will not take offense at the unavoidable conclusion that most of the time all of us talk some nonsense, that is, express our...

Deductivism — the original sin in economics Mathematics, especially through the work of David Hilbert, became increasingly viewed as a discipline properly concerned with providing a pool of frameworks for possible realities … This emergence of the axiomatic method removed at a stroke various hitherto insurmountable constraints facing those who would mathematise the discipline of economics. Researchers involved with mathematical projects in economics could, for the time being at least,...