Lars P. Syll

Thinking of spending an extended weekend at his summer residence, yours truly wanted to take five of his favourite books with him. On my bookshelf are five books by Strindberg and four by Shakespeare. I thought of bringing with me at least two of the Strindberg volumes. In how many ways can I do this?

What’s the use of economics? The simple question that was raised during a recent conference … was to what extent has — or should — the teaching of economics be modified … The simple answer is that the economics profession is unlikely to change. Why would economists be willing to give up much of their human capital, painstakingly nurtured for over two centuries? For macroeconomists in particular, the reaction has been to suggest that modifications of...

A humble suggestion …

Ecological economist Herman Daly has passed away at the age of 84. Together with economists such as Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, he was one of the founding fathers of ecological economics. R.I.P.

Alter Friedhof Prenzlauer Allee

Guest appearance​​ in Berlin. Regular blogging to be resumed next week.

Leontief and the sorry state of economics Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions … Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic...

Some economists seem to be überjoyed by the fact that they are using the same ‘language’ as real business cycles macroeconomists and that they therefore somehow can learn something from them. James Tobin obviously did not find any need to speak the RBC ‘language’: They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and...

Schubert — Quintet, Op. post. 163, D. 956: II. Adagio .[embedded content]

Sveriges riksdag år 2022 I sanning en vacker syn — klimatförnekaren Elsa Widding (SD) talar i Sveriges riksdag under det att evolutionsförnekaren och vice talman Julia Kronlid (SD) andäktigt lyssnar. Herre du min milde! Och detta grodors plums och ankors plask ska man behöva åse och höra år 2022. Man tager sig för pannan.