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description= 15 posts published by Lars Syll during March 2026;
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the, of, economics, total, nonsense, recent, comments, lars, syll, ça, plane, pour, moi, school, manifesto, for, future, still, shining, after, all, these, years, perfect, day, personal, on, poverty, economic, model, platonism, who, owns, national, debt, rich, critical, realism, morphogenetic, approach, walk, life, what, wrong, with, neoliberal, work, absurd, fiction, habermas, im, unabgeschlossenen, dialog, mit, adorno, real, business, cycles, theory, how, to, make, progress, in, quantitative, analysis, foucault, empirical, insights, and, normative, confusions, nairu, posts, policy, reading, list, categories, archives,
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the (389), and (242), that (125), not (76), #school (69), are (66), for (55), new (52), world (52), share (45), opens (45), window (45), this (41), society (37), with (37), what (34), real (34), should (34), models (33), mar (32), one (32), its (32), they (32), from (31), more (31), der (31), bluesky (30), facebook (30), but (30), has (29), economic (28), must (27), may (26), their (26), social (26), can (26), die (26), cannot (25), und (25), have (23), economics (23), 2026 (22), our (22), jan (19), when (19), all (19), about (18), pupils (18), theory (17), how (17), something (17), knowledge (17), comments (16), apr (16), jun (16), posted (16), model (16), habermas (16), between (16), than (16), assumptions (16), future (16), jul (15), aug (15), sep (15), oct (15), nov (15), dec (15), feb (15), only (15), own (15), these (15), today (15), such (14), make (14), without (14), analysis (14), kind (14), any (13), there (13), whole (13), dass (13), individual (13), other (12), 2012 (12), 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t be public debt is neither good nor bad it is a means of achieving two overarching macroeconomic goals full employment and price stability what is sacred is not to have a balanced budget or run down public debt per se regardless of the effects on the macroeconomic goals if sound finance austerity and balanced budgets mean increased unemployment and destabilising prices they have to be abandoned wealth inequality constitutes a structural feature of contemporary economic systems as proponents of mmt have long argued fiscal deficits may be necessary to sustain effective demand and ensure full employment however such deficits also entail a distributional consequence they often facilitate the flow of unearned income from the public sector to affluent private actors from a distributional perspective this dynamic requires deliberate countermeasures as murphy emphasises policy interventions should include lowering the interest rates paid on public debt increasing taxation on unearned income and rendering tax systems more progressive overall furthermore the ownership of wealth must be democratised given that public funds are routinely employed to stabilise economies it is normatively compelling that public ownership constitute a meaningful component of future economic arrangements share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky critical realism the morphogenetic approach 26 mar 2026 at 15 47 posted in theory of science methodology comments off on critical realism the morphogenetic approach share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky walk of life 25 mar 2026 at 16 07 posted in varia comments off on walk of life 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 s wrong with economics 24 mar 2026 at 14 54 posted in economics 5 comments what economics does is to convert open systems into closed systems by excluding moves which would render the system unstable dictators freeze the frame by order economists do it by modelling they model the world as a giant computer network in which every possible move has been programmed and anything outside the frame excluded by assumption economists are seduced by the thought that because humans are part of nature their code can be cracked just like that of physical objects but even those who hold out this hope admit that humans are uniquely complicated this makes social systems for all practical purposes almost infinitely complex the method of freezing the frame and including in it only measurable moves works well enough in the analysis of individual markets or firms in isolation but it breaks down when applied to a whole economy to be analytical and logical is a quality most people find commendable these words carry a positive connotation scientists are thought to think more deeply than most because they employ logical and analytical methods dictionaries often define logic as reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity and analysis as concerning the breaking down of something but this is not the whole picture as used in science analysis usually implies something more specific it means to separate a problem into its constituent elements thereby reducing complex and often complicated wholes into smaller simpler and more manageable parts one takes the whole and breaks it down decomposes it into its separate parts by examining the parts individually one is supposed to gain a better understanding of how they operate built upon this more or less atomistic knowledge one then expects to be able to predict and explain the behaviour of the complex and complicated whole in economics this means taking the economic system dividing it into its separate parts analysing these parts one at a time and then after separate analysis putting the pieces back together the analytical approach is typically used in economic modelling where one begins with a simple model containing few isolated and idealised variables through successive approximations one then adds more variables aiming finally to arrive at a true model of the whole this may sound like a convincing and sound scientific approach the approach however rests on a precarious assumption the procedure only works effectively when one has a machine like whole a system or economy where the parts exist in fixed and stable configurations and if there is anything we know about reality it is that it is not a machine the world we inhabit is not a closed system on the contrary it is an essentially open system things are uncertain relational interdependent complex and ever changing without assuming that the underlying structure of the economy you are trying to analyse remains stable and invariant there is no chance the equations in your model will hold constant this is the very rationale for economists use often only implicitly of the ceteris paribus assumption but nota bene this can only be a hypothesis you must argue the case for it if you cannot supply any sustainable justifications or warrants for the adequacy of that assumption then the entire analytical economic project becomes pointless uninformative nonsense not only must we assume that we can shield variables from each other analytically external closure we must also assume that each variable itself is amenable to being understood as a stable regularity producing machine internal closure we know of course that this is generally not possible some things relations and structures are not analytically graspable trying to analyse parenthood marriage or employment piece by piece does not make sense to be a chieftain a capital owner or a slave is not an individual property of a person it can only exist when individuals are integral parts of certain social structures and positions social relations and contexts cannot be reduced to individual phenomena a cheque presupposes a banking system and being a tribe member presupposes a tribe by failing to account for this in their analytical approach economic analysis becomes uninformative nonsense using logical and analytical methods in the social sciences often means economists succumb to the fallacy of composition the belief that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts in society and the economy this is arguably not the case an adequate analysis of society and the economy a fortiori cannot proceed by merely adding up the acts and decisions of individuals the whole is more than the sum of its parts mainstream economics is built on using the analytical method the models built with this method presuppose that social reality is closed since social reality is known to be fundamentally open it is difficult to see how such models can explain anything about what happens in such a universe postulating closed conditions to make models operational and then imputing these closed conditions to society s actual structure is an unwarranted procedure that fails to take necessary ontological considerations seriously in the face of the methodological individualism and rational choice theory that dominate mainstream economics we must admit that whilst knowing the aspirations and intentions of individuals is necessary for explaining social events it is far from sufficient even the most elementary rational actions in society presuppose the existence of social forms that cannot be reduced to individual intentions here the analytical method fails once more the overarching flaw with the analytical economic approach using methodological individualism and rational choice theory is that it reduces social explanations to purportedly individual characteristics but many of an individual s characteristics and actions originate in and are made possible only through society and its relations society is not a wittgensteinian tractatus world characterised by atomistic states of affairs society is not reducible to individuals since the social characteristics forces and actions of the individual are determined by pre existing social structures and positions even though society is not a volitional individual and the individual is not an entity existing outside society the individual actor and society structure must be kept analytically distinct they are tied together through the individual s reproduction and transformation of already given social structures since at least the marginal revolution in economics in the 1870s it has been an essential feature of the discipline to analytically treat individuals as essentially independent and separate entities of action and decision but in truth in a complex organic and evolutionary system like an economy that kind of independence is a profoundly unrealistic assumption to simply assume strict independence between the variables we try to analyse does not help us in the least if that hypothesis proves unwarranted to apply the analytical approach economists must essentially assume that the universe consists of atoms that exercise their own separate and invariable effects such that the whole consists of nothing but an addition of these separate atoms and their changes these simplistic assumptions of isolation atomicity and additivity are however at odds with reality in real world settings we know that ever changing contexts make it futile to seek knowledge through such reductionist assumptions real world individuals are not reducible to contentless atoms and are thus not susceptible to atomistic analysis the world is not reducible to a set of atomistic individuals and states how variable x works and influences real world economies in situation a cannot simply be assumed to be understood by looking at how x works in situation b knowledge of x probably tells us little if we do not consider its dependence on y and z it can never be legitimate simply to assume the world is atomistic assuming real world additivity cannot be correct if the entities around us are not atoms but organic entities if we want to develop new and better economics we must give up the single minded insistence on using a deductivist straitjacket methodology and the analytical method to focus scientific endeavours solely on proving things within models is a gross misapprehension of the purpose of economic theory deductivist models and analytical methods disconnected from reality are not relevant for predicting explaining or understanding real world economies to have consistent models and valid evidence is not enough what economics needs are real world relevant models and sound evidence aiming only for consistency and validity sets the aspirations of economics too low for developing a realistic and relevant science economics is not mathematics or logic it is about society the real world models may help us think through problems but we should never forget that the formalism we use in our models is not self evidently transportable to a largely unknown and uncertain reality the tragedy of mainstream economic theory is that it believes the logic and mathematics it uses are sufficient for dealing with our real world problems they are not model deductions based on questionable assumptions can never be anything but pure exercises in hypothetical reasoning the world in which we live is inherently uncertain and quantifiable probabilities are the exception rather than the rule to every statement about it is attached a weight of argument that makes it impossible to reduce our beliefs and expectations to a one dimensional stochastic probability distribution if god does not play dice as einstein maintained i would add nor do people the world as we know it has limited scope for certainty and perfect knowledge its intrinsic and almost unlimited complexity and the interrelatedness of its organic parts prevent us from treating it as if it were constituted by legal atoms with discretely distinct separable and stable causal relations our knowledge accordingly has to be of a rather fallible kind if the real world is fuzzy vague and indeterminate then why should our models be built upon a desire to describe it as precise and predictable even if there always has to be a trade off between theory internal validity and external validity we must ask ourselves if our models are truly relevant human logic must supplant the classical formal logic of deductivism if we wish to say anything interesting about the real world we inhabit logic is a marvellous tool in mathematics and axiomatic deductivist systems but a poor guide for action in real world systems where concepts and entities lack clear boundaries and continually interact and overlap in this world we are better served by a methodology that acknowledges that the more we know the more we know we do not know mathematics and logic cannot establish the truth value of facts never have never will share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky neoliberal economics a work of absurd fiction 24 mar 2026 at 12 12 posted in economics comments off on neoliberal economics a work of absurd fiction rigorous and precise economic models cannot be considered anything else than unsubstantiated conjectures as long as they aren t supported by evidence from outside the theory or model to my knowledge no in any way decisive empirical evidence has been presented no matter how precise and rigorous the analysis and no matter how hard one tries to cast the argument in modern mathematical form these models do not push economic science forward one single millimetre if they do not stand the acid test of relevance to the target no matter how clear precise rigorous or certain the inferences delivered inside these models are they do not say anything about real world economies proving things rigorously in a model is at most a starting point for doing an interesting and relevant economic analysis forgetting to supply export warrants to the real world makes the analysis an empty exercise in formalism without real scientific value the kind of knowledge we seek in science differs from what we look for in fiction building fictional models that we all know are false not merely in the sense that they idealise or abstract all models do but in the sense that no amount of corrections amendments or successive approximations will ever make them true of the real world phenomena they aim to describe cannot be the right way to proceed in science although such model assumptions often of a mathematical kind are necessary for tractability they are far from harmless since they usually cannot be relaxed what drives them is their exact necessary form without which the sought after results would never be obtained if this kind of economic modelling as argued by some economic methodologists gives us the same kind of knowledge as we get in ordinary fiction well then surely we should seriou...
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