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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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to immunization against experience as such seen from a deductive nomological perspective typical economic models m usually consist of a theory t a set of more or less general typically universal law like hypotheses h and a set of typically spatio temporal auxiliary assumptions a the auxiliary assumptions give boundary descriptions such that it is possible to deduce logically meeting the standard of validity a conclusion explanandum from the premises t a using this kind of model economists are portrayed as trying to explain or predict facts by subsuming them under t given a an obvious problem with the formal logical requirements of what counts as h is the often severely restricted reach of the law in the worst case it may not be applicable to any real empirical relevant situation at all and if a is not true then m does not really explain although it may predict at all deductive arguments should be sound valid and with true premises so that we are assured of having true conclusions constructing theoretical models assuming common knowledge and rational expectations says nothing about situations where knowledge is non common and expectations are non rational building theories and models that are true in their own very limited idealised domain is of limited value if we cannot supply bridges to the real world laws that only apply in specific idealised circumstances in nomological machines are not the stuff that real science is built of when confronted with the massive empirical refutations of almost all models they have set up many economists react by saying that these refutations only hit a the lakatosian protective belt and that by successive approximations it is possible to make the models more readily testable and predictably accurate even if t a1 do not have much empirical content if by successive approximation we reach say t a25 we are to believe that we can finally reach robust and true predictions and explanations hans albert s model platonism critique shows that there is a strong tendency for modellers to use the method of successive approximations as a kind of immunisation taking for granted that there can never be any faults with the theory explanatory and predictive failures hinge solely on auxiliary assumptions that the kind of theories and models used by economists should all be held non defeasibly corroborated seems however to say the least rather unwarranted retreating into looking upon models and theories as some kind of conceptual exploration and giving up any hopes whatsoever of relating theories and models to the real world is pure defeatism instead of trying to bridge the gap between models and the world they simply decide to look the other way to yours truly this kind of scientific defeatism is equivalent to surrendering our search for understanding and explaining the world we live in it cannot be enough to prove or deduce things in a model world if theories and models do not directly or indirectly tell us anything about the world we live in then why should we waste any of our precious time on them share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky who owns the national debt the rich 28 mar 2026 at 15 07 posted in economics 1 comment public debt is normally nothing to fear especially if it is financed within the country itself but even foreign loans could benefit the economy if invested correctly some members of society hold bonds and earn interest on them while others have to pay taxes that ultimately pay the interest on the debt however the debt is not a net burden for society as a whole since the debt cancels itself out between the two groups if the state could issue bonds at a low interest rate unemployment could be reduced without necessarily resulting in strong inflationary pressure and the inter generational burden is no real burden since if used suitably the debt through its effects on investments and employment actually makes the coming generations net winners of course there may be undesirable distributional consequences for future generations however this concern is relatively minor to the extent that future generations repay the national debt they are effectively making payments to themselves since these payments will be made to their children and grandchildren and to nobody else to both keynes and lerner it was evident that the state could promote full employment and a stable price level and that it should use its powers to do so if that meant that it had to take on a debt and more or less temporarily underbalance its budget so let it 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 econo...
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