LARS P. SYLL

A horse with no name

Thinking with Habermas against Habermas

Jürgen Habermas was undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, a thinker for whom I have long held the deepest esteem. Yet his public interventions on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza revealed a political philosopher in his nineties who had, it seems, lost touch with a shifting geopolitical reality. The connection [ ]

The Malaise of Modernity — Adorno, Habermas, and Taylor on the Fate of Reason

Jürgen Habermas is often seen as the most prominent representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, a successor to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. But the relationship is far more complicated. Habermas both inherited the Institute s legacy and fundamentally reoriented it. The primary point of contention lies in the project of Critical [ ]

Cherry-picking economic models

How would you react if a renowned physicist, say, Richard Feynman, were telling you that sometimes force is proportional to acceleration and at other times it is proportional to acceleration squared? I guess you would be unimpressed. But actually, what most mainstream economists do amounts to the same strange thing when it comes to theory [ ]

Bröllopsdagen 10 augusti för 24 år sedan (personal)

La Grande Bellezza

Il film La Grande Bellezza è un labirinto di citazioni e rimandi culturali che ne arricchiscono la profondità. Si va dalla letteratura al cinema, dalla musica alla storia dell arte. Questa trama di riferimenti lo trasforma in un ragionamento amaro sulla contemporaneità, rendendolo un opera che sollecita riflessioni continue. È uno dei film più belli e toccanti che [ ]

My moral compass (personal)

This is the advice I’ve always given my children when they’ve come and asked for guidance when confronted with momentous moral issues in life: Ask yourself — Can I do this and still like what I see in the mirror tomorrow when I wake up? That moral compass has served me well for half a [ ]

Monetary policies creating problems they are supposed to cure

The current inflation is partly about some companies and capital owners taking the opportunity to increase their profit margins without there being any real cost increases that would ‘justify’ this. This type of ‘stealth’ price increase becomes easier to implement as inflation expectations rise. As always in the market, it is those with fewer resources [ ]

Sverige — de rikas skatteparadis

År 1991 genomförde Sverige det som sedan dess har kallats för århundradets skattereform. Denna reform innebar en genomgripande omstrukturering av det svenska skattesystemet, vilket resulterade i en betydande sänkning av den totala skattebördan. Bolagsskatten, som i slutet av 1980-talet låg på omkring 60 procent, sänktes stegvis och ligger idag på cirka 21 procent. En central [ ]

Den ekonomiska politikens misslyckanden

Sällan eller aldrig har man anledning vara nöjd med ekonomijournalistiken i press, radio och television. Ytterst få ekonomijournalister och börsanalytiker tar sitt jobb på allvar och bedriver ekonomisk journalistik värd namnet. De flesta av oss har därför sedan länge gett upp. Synd bara att allmänheten ska behöva nöja sig med det tyckmyckentrutade nonsens som helt [ ]

‘Sound finance’ — a sign of obstinate ignorance

This really should not be so hard to understand. It is not rocket science. It is simple. In The Affluent Society as Galbraith had it the rich save more than the poor. To close the demand gap, governments have to run deficits. The economic policies pursued by the authorities nowadays cannot [ ]

The corrosive influence of postmodernist academia

At first glance, one might be impressed by the avalanche of words in postmodernist texts. To yours truly, however, it seems more like pretentious polysyllabic verbiage. Reading Judith Butler, for example, feels like deciphering IKEA instructions penned by a poetic robot having a nervous breakdown. It is nonsense on stilts. While the most immediate threats [ ]

Happy Together

Challenging the RCT Hype

Parra and Edwards interesting article highlights some of the fundamental problems with the present idolatry of evidence-based policies and randomisation designs in the field of education. Unfortunately, we face the same problems in economics. The point of making a randomised experiment is often said to be that it ensures that any correlation between a supposed [ ]

Econometric ‘causality’

Reading Abbott s article made me come to think of an article Judea Pearl was kind enough to send me some years ago (co-authored with Bryant Chen and later published as Regression and causation: a critical examination of six econometrics textbooks in the real-world economics review, issue no. 65) Pearl has for years been part of an [ ]

Rethinking the growth imperative

The concept of a growth imperative — the idea that capitalist economies must continually expand — can be fruitfully examined through the lens of what we now call endogenous growth theory, largely developed by Nobel laureate Paul Romer. In this framework, the growth imperative is effectively internalised within the economic system, echoing, in some respects, [ ]

Hur är du klädd, människa?

Perfect day (personal)

. Spending a beautiful Sunday in Kullabygden s nature reserve with Jeanette, Hanna, Linnea, and David. You just keep me hanging on 🙂

Börsen — ett insiderperspektiv

De instrument, som neoklassiska nationalekonomer och finansmarknadens egna representanter brukar säga vara skapade för att fördela risken på ett optimalt sätt mellan olika aktörer, klarar inte av att fylla sin uppgift när det inte finns någon trovärdig mekanism för att bedöma riskerna. Inte ens på kapitalismens flaggskepp de finansiella marknaderna lyckas man reducera [ ]

Regeringens vansinniga bensinpolitik

Det är inte så ofta yours truly har anledning apostrofera uttalanden av herr Hassler, men här har han ju för en gångs skull helt rätt. Hasslers som vanligt helt missvisande uttalanden om finanspolitiska ramverk och statsskuld får jag återkomma med kommentarer till en annan gång.

Neyman vs Fisher on causal inference

Every day, you see headlines such as New drug shows no effect or Study finds no evidence a policy works. They sound conclusive. They sound scientific. But the uncomfortable reality is that scientists do not even agree on what no effect actually means. This is not an obscure dispute over statistical formulae. It is a deep philosophical divide between two of the most influential figures in the…