Lars P. Syll

Why non-existence of uncertainty is such a monstrously absurd assumption All these pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-panelled Board Room and a nicely regulated market, are liable to collapse. At all times the vague panic fears and equally vague and unreasoned hopes are not really lulled, and lie but a little way below the surface. Perhaps the reader feels that this general, philosophical disquisition on the behavior of mankind is somewhat remote from the economic theory under...

Question the monetary system and you’re academically dead!  [embedded content]Bernard Lietaer is a former professor of international finance and president at the Central Bank of Belgium.

Did Keynes ‘accept’ the IS-LM model? Lord Keynes has some interesting references and links for those wanting to dwell upon the question if Keynes really “accepted” Hicks’s IS-LM model. My own view is that  IS-LM doesn’t adequately reflect the width and depth of Keynes’s insights on the workings of modern market economies: 1  Almost nothing in the post-General Theory writings of Keynes suggests him considering Hicks’s IS-LM anywhere near a faithful rendering of his thought. In Keynes’s...

Lauritz Weibull och den källkritiska Lundamyten “Kritiska undersökningar i Weibull-mytens historia” … är på en gång en stridsskrift, en detetektivbragd och ett stycke – föga uppbygglig – lärdomshistoria. Arvidssons-Aarsleffs teori om weibullianismens härstamning är långt mer plausibel än L W:s egen redogörelse, och den är oändligt mycket mer plausibel än den självmotsägande advokatyr hans väpnare presterat. Arvidsson och Aarsleff argumenterar elegant och stringent för sin tes, men...

Bayesianism — a scientific cul-de-sac One of my favourite “problem situating lecture arguments” against Bayesianism goes something like this: Assume you’re a Bayesian turkey and hold a nonzero probability belief in the hypothesis H that “people are nice vegetarians that do not eat turkeys and that every day I see the sun rise confirms my belief.” For every day you survive, you update your belief according to Bayes’ Rule P(H|e) = [P(e|H)P(H)]/P(e), where evidence e stands for “not being...

‘Le pied dans le plat’  [embedded content] Old love dies hard …

We few, we happy few  [embedded content] Saint Crispin’s Day falls on 25 October and is the feast day of Saint Crispin. It is a day most famous for the Battle of Agincourt, that occurred on it in 1415.

Paul “Chicolini” Ryan  [embedded content] “He may talk like an idiot, he may look like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you, he really is an idiot.”

Because I was there when the economics department of my university got an IBM 360, I was very much caught up in the excitement of combining powerful computers with economic research. Unfortunately, I lost interest in econometrics almost as soon as I understood how it was done. My thinking went through four stages: 1.Holy shit! Do you see what you can do with a computer’s help. 2.Learning computer modeling puts you in a small class where only other members of the caste can truly...

 [embedded content] In loving memory of Kristina.