Lars P. Syll

The Swedish for-profit ‘free’ school disaster Gustav Fridolin, Sweden’s rather youthful education minister, emerges from behind his desk in a pleasant office in central Stockholm wearing what looks like a pair of Vans and the open, fresh-faced smile of a newly qualified teacher. The smile falters when he begins to describe the plight of Sweden’s schools and the scale of the challenge that lies ahead. Fridolin, it turns out, is the man in charge of rescuing a school system in crisis....

Why the euro divides Europe The ‘European idea’—or better: ideology—notwithstanding, the euro has split Europe in two. As the engine of an ever-closer union the currency’s balance sheet has been disastrous. Norway and Switzerland will not be joining the eu any time soon; Britain is actively considering leaving it altogether. Sweden and Denmark were supposed to adopt the euro at some point; that is now off the table. The Eurozone itself is split between surplus and deficit countries, North...

Dumb and Dumber — the Chicago version Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s (sic!), as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact...

Angus Deaton on the limited value of RCTs I think economists, especially development economists, are sort of like economists in the 50’s with regressions. They have a magic tool but they don’t yet have much of an idea of the problems with that magic tool. And there are a lot of them. I think it’s just like any other method of estimation, it has its advantages and disadvantages. I think RCTs rarely meet the hype. People turned to RCTs because they got tired of all the arguments over...

What makes arguments successful  [embedded content]

Economics textbooks — when the model becomes the message Wendy Carlin and David Soskice have a new intermediate macroeonomics textbook — Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability, and the Financial System (Oxford University Press 2015) — out on the market. It builds more than most other intermediate macroeconomics textbooks on supplying the student with a “systematic way of thinking through problems” with the help of formal-mathematical models. Carlin and Soskice explicitly adapts a ‘New...

After almost forty years in Lund, yours truly last year returned to the town where he was born and bred — Malmö. Taking a stroll in the neighbourhood with the dog further convinced me returning was a good decision …

Representative agent models — macroeconomic foundations made of sand Representative-agent models suffer from an inherent, and, in my view, fatal, flaw: they can’t explain any real macroeconomic phenomenon, because a macroeconomic phenomenon has to encompass something more than the decision of a single agent, even an omniscient central planner. At best, the representative agent is just a device for solving an otherwise intractable general-equilibrium model, which is how I think Lucas...

Excellent and not so excellent Nobel prize winners A truly excellent economics Nobel Prize–I have learned a lot from Angus Deaton. And I look at my desk and see my copy of Akerlof and Shiller’s Phishing for Phools that I am halfway through on my desk. And I think about the panel I was on with Paul Krugman at New York Comic Con yesterday. There is a subset of economics Nobel Prize winners who are true geniuses, from whom I have learned and continue to learn an immense amount. But then I...

On the irrelevance of formal logic in economics In the case of substantial arguments, however, there is no question of data and backing taken together entailing the conclusion, or failing to entail it: just because the steps involved are substantial ones, it is no use either looking for entailments or being disappointed if we do not find them. Their absence does not spring from a lamentable weakness in the arguments, but from the nature of the problems with which they are designed to deal....