Having read Syll’s book, one cannot avoid wondering how it is that modern mathematical economics still holds such a dominant position in terms of textbooks and economic practice. This is especially so if you consider two things: First, if one peruses the shelves of economic literature of any major bookstore (in London or even Copenhagen), […]
economics
Unfortunately, assumption uncertainty reduces the status of deductions and statistical computations to exercises in hypothetical reasoning – they provide best-case scenarios of what we could infer from specific data. Even more unfortunate, however, is that this exercise is deceptive to the extent it ignores or misrepresents available information, and makes hidden assumptions that are unsupported […]
Jason Collins discusses a paper by Milkman et al. that presented “a megastudy testing 54 interventions to increase the gym visits of 61,000 experimental participants” … Collins’s discussion seems reasonable to me. In particular, I agree with his big problem about the design of this “mega-study,” which is that there’s all sorts of rigor in the […]
[Jevons] is a man of some ability, but he seems to me to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, and with a notation implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of. John Stuart Mill Fixation on constructing models — “implying the existence of greater precision in […]
After being tasked with editing David Ricardo’s Collected Works in 1930, Sraffa, with the assistance of Maurice Dobb, published them between 1951 and 1973. This work earned him the 1961 Söderström Gold Medal from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For the edition, Sraffa wrote an interesting and thought-provoking introduction. Its purpose was to demonstrate […]
Flamman (F): Först och främst, vad är MMT? Lars Pålsson Syll (LPS): I grunden är det en reaktion på sättet som pengar och hur de skapas beskrivs i den traditionella ekonomiska litteraturen. Där beskrivs pengar som något som man sparar genom att in dem på banken, och som banken i sin tur kan låna ut […]
. Interessante Diskussion, nicht zuletzt Adam Tooze’s Beitrag.
My early academic work was on the Phillips curve and the precision in estimating the concept of a natural rate of unemployment, or the rate of unemployment where inflation stabilises at some level. This rate is now commonly referred to as the Non-Accelerating-Rate-of-Unemployment (NAIRU) and my contribution was one of the first studies to show…
Göran Perssons ord från mitten av 1990-talet ekar fortfarande genom svensk politik. Varje politiskt förslag som kan höja statsskulden bemöts av varningar om hur Sverige på den tiden stod på ruinens brant. Perssons resa till New York, där han enligt egen utsago tvingades gå med mössan i hand till Wall Streets lånehajar och utlova nedskärningar, […]
There is a trade-off in economics (and elsewhere) between rigor and relevance: the more we achieve deductive certainty in our arguments, the less likely it is that we will achieve socially and politically relevant conclusions. This trade-off, as we shall see, is not logically inevitable but, nevertheless, it is rarely avoided in economic theorizing. Sraffian […]