Lars P. Syll

I came to think about this dictum when reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Tenty-First Century.  Piketty refuses to use the term ‘human capital’ in his inequality analysis. I think there are many good reasons not to include ‘human capital’ in economic analyses. Let me just give one — perhaps analytically the most important one — reason and elaborate a little on that. In modern endogenous growth theory knowledge (ideas) is presented as the locomotive of growth. But as Allyn Young,...

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We teachers do our best to be Socratic, to get our job of re-education, secularization, and liberalization done by conversational exchange. That is true up to a point, but what about assigning books like Black Boy, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Becoming a Man? The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people – black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these...

 [embedded content]   Seems to be a universal trend. Even in Sweden we have lots of people who are offended by anything …  

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Econometrics and the ’empirical turn’ in economics The increasing use of natural and quasi-natural experiments in economics during the last couple of decades has led some economists to triumphantly declare it as a major step on a recent path toward empirics, where instead of being a deductive philosophy, economics is now increasingly becoming an inductive science. In their plaidoyer for this view, the work of Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke is often apostrophized, so lets start with...

Back in the 80’s yours truly had the pleasure of studying at University of Vienna. I wish I could visit it again. A wonderful town full of history and Kaffeehäuser. When not studying I used to listen to Leonard Cohen: [embedded content]

Science — a strange intoxication Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this...

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How to get published in ‘top’ economics journals By the early 1980s it was already common knowledge among people I hung out with that the only way to get non-crazy macroeconomics published was to wrap sensible assumptions about output and employment in something else, something that involved rational expectations and intertemporal stuff and made the paper respectable. And yes, that was conscious knowledge, which shaped the kinds of papers we wrote. Paul Krugman More or less says it all,...