Lars P. Syll

The insufficiency of validity Mainstream economics is at its core in the story-telling business whereby economic theorists create make-believe analogue models of the target system – usually conceived as the real economic system. This modelling activity is considered useful and essential. Since fully-fledged experiments on a societal scale as a rule are prohibitively expensive, ethically indefensible or unmanageable, economic theorists have to substitute...

Mainstream economics — a vending machine view The theory is a vending machine: you feed it input in certain prescribed forms for the desired output; it gurgitates for a while; then it drops out the sought-for representation, plonk, on the tray, fully formed, as Athena from the brain of Zeus. This image of the relation of theory to the models we use to represent the world is hard to fit with what we know of how science works. When applying deductivist...

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Feynman’s integral trick (student stuff) .[embedded content] I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me. [It] showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign – it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. [If]...

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Social scientists pursue a variety of different purposes such as predicting events of interest, explaining individual events or general phenomena, and controlling outcomes for policy. It is interesting to note that the language of“cause” is employed in all these contexts … What kind of causal hypothesis should be investigated (and, in tandem, what kind of evidence should be sought) therefore is to be determined on the basis of purpose pursued in the given context. For certain...

.[embedded content] The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor​ and talent, but — even worse — to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment … To be sure, any society will have its achievers no matter what, if only because it has its own division...

‘New Keynesian’ price stickiness ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists have for years been arguing (e.g. here) about the importance of the New Classical Counter Revolution in economics. ‘Helping’ to change the way macroeconomics is done today — with rational expectations, Euler equations, intertemporal optimization, and microfoundations — their main critique of New Classical macroeconomics is that it didn’t incorporate price stickiness into the Real Business...

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Under det dryga decennium som jag har kritiserat vinstintresset i skolan har Thorengruppens härjningar varit en följetong. Redan 2011 kom Skolinspektionen med sin första dräpande rapport om allvarliga missförhållanden. En lärare vittnade senare för mig om hur gruppen startade yrkesgymnasier utan så mycket som en svets eller hammare i lokalerna. Alla har vetat hur illa det har varit. Ändå har ingen satt stopp. Det är ett så bottenlöst svek mot Sveriges elever att detta missbruk...