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description= 15 posts published by Lars Syll during February 2019;
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ew positions of the two curves but this is a nonsense theory for the assumption that income is constant is inconsistent with the assumption that these two curves can shift independently of one another if either of them shifts then in general income will change with the result that the whole schematism based on the assumption of a given income breaks down in truth the classical theory has not been alive to the relevance of changes in the level of income or to the possibility of the level of income being actually a function of the rate of the investment savers and investors have different liquidity preferences and face different choices and their interactions usually only take place intermediated by financial institutions this importantly also means that there is no direct and immediate automatic interest mechanism at work in modern monetary economies what happens at the microeconomic level is not always compatible with the macroeconomic outcome the atomistic fallacy has many faces loanable funds is one of them we have to free ourselves from the loanable funds theory and scholastic gibbering about zlb and start using good old keynesian fiscal policies keynes as did lerner kaldor kalecki and robinson showed that it was possible to promote economic growth with an appropriate size of the budget deficit the stimulus a well functioning fiscal policy aimed at full employment may have on investment and productivity does not necessarily have to be offset by higher interest rates share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky that s the right spirit 26 feb 2019 at 07 34 posted in varia comments off on that s the right spirit what s wrong with mmt nothing 25 feb 2019 at 19 17 posted in economics 47 comments mmtists often like to position themselves as the only ones to properly understand the operational realities of modern monetary systems ironically many of the claims made by mmtists on this topic are misleading at best one common rhetorical tactic that i ve noticed they employ which often catches their critics out is to use the term government in a way that s different typically from how it is used in mainstream economics when they say government they tend to include basically any institution that is an agent of the state including the central bank hence the government here includes consolidating the treasury and the central bank into one entity effectively ignoring or assuming away any independence the central bank may have upholding economics effectively ignoring or assuming away any independence the central bank may have that is strange indeed last just to take one example i had a look in l randall wray s modern money theory there were more than fifty pages devoted to technical details of central bank and treasury coordination and diverse fiscal operations of the fed and the treasury guess we have to go looking for bad monetary crankery somewhere else share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky what makes collective action more likely 25 feb 2019 at 18 09 posted in theory of science methodology comments off on what makes collective action more likely notte di luce 25 feb 2019 at 14 31 posted in varia comments off on notte di luce respiro il silenzio dei tuoi pensieri un giorno sarai tutto quello che speri werewolves of london 25 feb 2019 at 14 07 posted in varia comments off on werewolves of london abba lerner and the true nature of public debt 24 feb 2019 at 21 01 posted in economics 6 comments one of the most effective ways of clearing up this most serious of all semantic confusions is to point out that private debt differs from national debt in being external it is owed by one person to others that is what makes it burdensome because it is interpersonal the proper analogy is not to national debt but to international debt but this does not hold for national debt which is owed by the nation to citizens of the same nation there is no external creditor we owe it to ourselves a variant of the false analogy is the declaration that national debt puts an unfair burden on our children who are thereby made to pay for our extravagances very few economists need to be reminded that if our children or grandchildren repay some of the national debt these payments will be made to our children or grandchildren and to nobody else taking them altogether they will no more be impoverished by making the repayments than they will be enriched by receiving them abba lerner the burden of the national debt 1948 share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky equilibrium an assumption making many theories inaccurate 23 feb 2019 at 17 42 posted in economics 2 comments for the learning rules we study the players never converge to any sort of intertemporal equilibrium in the sense that their expectations do not match the outcomes of the game even in a statistical sense are these results relevant for macroeconomics can we expect insights that hold at the small scale of strategic interactions between two players to also be valid at much larger scales while our theory does not directly map to more general settings many economic scenarios buying and selling in financial markets innovation strategies in competing firms supply chain management are complicated and competitive this raises the possibility that some important theories in economics may be inaccurate challenges to the behavioral assumption of equilibrium also challenge the predictions of the model in this case new approaches are required that explicitly simulate the behavior of economic agents and take into account the fact that real people are not good at solving complicated problems marco pangallo torsten heinrich j doyne farmer les actes antisémites en hausse en france 23 feb 2019 at 10 51 posted in politics society 1 comment après deux années de baisse les actes antisémites en france sont en très forte hausse 69 sur les neuf premiers mois de 2018 s alarme le premier ministre edouard philippe dans une tribune publiée vendredi 9 novembre sur facebook chaque agression perpétrée contre un de nos concitoyens parce qu il est juif résonne comme un nouveau bris de cristal affirme le chef du gouvernement dans cette tribune publiée exactement quatre vingts ans après la funeste nuit de cristal et ses exactions nazies contre les juifs en allemagne le 9 novembre 1938 pourquoi rappeler en 2018 un aussi pénible souvenir parce que nous sommes très loin d en avoir fini avec l antisémitisme écrit l ancien maire du havre évoquant les chiffres implacables des actes antisémites en france sur la partie écoulée de 2018 le monde share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky the limits of probabilistic reasoning 23 feb 2019 at 08 45 posted in statistics econometrics 2 comments almost a hundred years after john maynard keynes wrote his seminal a treatise on probability 1921 it is still very difficult to find statistics books that seriously try to incorporate his far reaching and incisive analysis of induction and evidential weight the standard view in statistics and the axiomatic probability theory underlying it is to a large extent based on the rather simplistic idea that more is better but as keynes argues more of the same is not what is important when making inductive inferences it s rather a question of more but different variation not replication is at the core of induction finding that p x y p x y w doesn t make w irrelevant knowing that the probability is unchanged when w is present gives p x y w another evidential weight running 10 replicative experiments do not make you as sure of your inductions as when running 10 000 varied experiments even if the probability values happen to be the same according to keynes we live in a world permeated by unmeasurable uncertainty not quantifiable stochastic risk which often forces us to make decisions based on anything but rational expectations keynes rather thinks that we base our expectations on the confidence or weight we put on different events and alternatives to keynes expectations are a question of weighing probabilities by degrees of belief beliefs that often have preciously little to do with the kind of stochastic probabilistic calculations made by the rational agents as modelled by modern social sciences and often we simply do not know science according to keynes should help us penetrate to the true process of causation lying behind current events and disclose the causal forces behind the apparent facts models can never be more than a starting point in that endeavour he further argued that it was inadmissible to project history on to the future consequently we cannot presuppose that what has worked before will continue to do so in the future that statistical models can get hold of correlations between different variables is not enough if they cannot get at the causal structure that generated the data they are not really identified how strange that economists and other social scientists as a rule do not even touch upon these aspects of scientific methodology that seems to be so fundamental and important for anyone trying to understand how we learn and orient ourselves in an uncertain world an educated guess on why this is a fact would be that keynes concepts are not possible to squeeze into a single calculable numerical probability in the quest for quantities one puts a blind eye to qualities and looks the other way but keynes ideas keep creeping out from under the statistics carpet the validity of the inferential models we as scientists use ultimately depends on the assumptions we make about the entities to which we apply them applying the traditional calculus of probability presupposes far reaching ontological presuppositions if we are prepared to assume that societies and economies are like urns filled with coloured balls in fixed proportions then fine but really who could earnestly believe in such an utterly ridiculous analogy in a real world full of unknown unknowns and genuine non ergodic uncertainty urns are of little avail human decisions affecting the future whether personal or political or economic cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation since the basis for making such calculations does not exist and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able calculating where we can but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance j m keynes added tom hickey as always has some interesting comments on this post here share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky malmö i litteraturen 22 feb 2019 at 17 19 posted in varia comments off on malmö i litteraturen 1 hemstaden jacques werup 1981 2 underdog torbjörn flygt 2001 3 de ensamma pojkarna mats olsson 1995 4 stuv malmö kom fredrik ekelund 1984 5 yarden kristian lundberg 2009 monismus in der ökonomischen hochschullehre 22 feb 2019 at 13 49 posted in economics 1 comment eine reihe von studien des forschungsinstituts für gesellschaftliche weiterentwicklung hat in den letzten jahren den zustand der ökonomik in deutschland untersucht dabei wurde unter anderem gefragt welche lehrbücher verwendet werden wie plural sie sind und was eigentlich der wissenschaftliche nachwuchs über sein fach denkt insgesamt bestätigen die studierenden der stichprobe die kritikpunkte der pluralismus debatte sie nehmen im lehralltag kaum bezüge zu angrenzenden disziplinen wahr wie z b geschichte psychologie oder soziologie dabei stimmt der großteil der befragten 74 2 der aussage zu dass erkenntnisse aus anderen fächern notwendig seien um ökonomische sachverhalte verstehen zu können stattdessen sei das vwl studium praxisfern 55 und von einer starken mathematischen grundausrichtung geprägt dies zeigt sich besonders in den vermittelten methoden es dominieren gleichgewichts 93 5 und aggregierte ma kroökono mische modelle 92 4 sowie regressions bzw zeitreihenanalysen 78 6 andere sozialwissenschaftliche zugänge wie fallstudien 27 5 experimente 22 4 umfragen 11 4 oder diskurs 8 4 bzw netzwerkanalysen 3 0 würden dagegen kaum in den ersten vier semestern vermittelt dies gilt ebenso für neuerungen innerhalb der vwl wie z b die bereiche neuroökonomik 2 4 und ökonophysik 0 6 das auseinanderdriften zwischen wissenschaft und gesellschaft und die wahrgenommenen einseitigkeiten in der ökonomischen hochschullehre führen allerdings nicht dazu dass sich die studierenden verstärkt für eine erneuerung ihres faches einsetzen zwar hat der großteil der befragten schon von der pluralismus debatte gehört nur wenige verfolgen diese jedoch intensiv und allein ein bruchteil ist persönlich engagiert etwa über die teilnahme an entsprechenden veranstaltungsreihen oder durch die mitarbeit in lokalen initiativen eva schweitzer krah tim engartner mmt krugman still does not get it 21 feb 2019 at 20 47 posted in economics 41 comments krugman complains that lerner was too cavalier in his discussion of monetary policy since he called for the interest rate to be set at the level that produces the most desirable level of investment without saying exactly what that rate should be it s an odd critique since krugman himself subscribes to the idea that monetary policy should target an invisible neutral rate a so called r star that exists when the economy is neither depressed nor overheating for what it s worth research suggests the neutral rate may be flat out wrong and fed chairman jerome powell has admitted that the fed has been too cavalier in relying on variables that cannot be measured directly and which can only be estimated with great uncertainty but lerner wasn t trying to use interest rates to optimize the economy that was a job for fiscal policy he argued that the government should be prepared to spend whatever is necessary to sustain full employment without raising taxes or borrowing krugman s other objection is that lerner didn t fully address the limitations both technical and political on tax hikes or spending cuts as a means of fighting inflation in fact lerner actually had quite a lot to say about this here s the opening sentence to an entire chapter on the subject in his 1951 book the economics of employment we have now concluded our treatment of the economics of employment but a word or two must be added on the politics and the administration of employment policies in general and of functional finance in particular emphasis in original where does that leave us paul krugman and i agree on a great many things but we come at certain questions from a fundamentally different place he believes there are inherent tradeoffs between fiscal and monetary policy outside of...
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