Monday, January 15, 2018

Lars P. Syll — Neoclassical economics is great — if it wasn’t for all the caveats!


The good (ideal) and the bad (real) of conventional economics.

The policy consequences are essentially two-fold.

The first is in not recognizing the disjunction between the ideal (formal) and the real (empirical), which violates the basic requirement of a scientific approach and makes the undertaking an excursion in philosophy rather than science, even though it is dressed put to look like science. The consequence is policy formulation that doesn't lead to the predicted results, since it is based on errors built into the assumptions.

The second is in recognizing the disconnect and trying to fit the real to the ideal through policy, which is a fool's errancy, since the assumptions as such that framework cannot generate models that are feasible to implement socially and politically because homo economicus is a fictional construct with little resemblance to the actual homo socialis. This leads to policy that is impractical and the results are the evidence of this.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

3 comments:

AXEC / E.K-H said...

NOTE on Lars Syll’s ‘Neoclassical economics is great — if it wasn’t for all the caveats!’

Lars Syll is a one-trick pony. The sum of his insight is that Neoclassical economics is a failure and Keynesianism is superior because its core assumption is ontological uncertainty which reduces economic knowledge ultimately to I know that I know nothing and anything goes, or, as Keynes put it, to “nothing is clear and everything is possible.”

Lars Syll never understood that science is not about unknown and unknowable unknowns but about certain knowledge. His hero is not Archimedes who figured out the Law of the Lever or Euclid who figured out that a square + b square = c square but the waffling philosopher Socrates with his shallow wisdom and false humbleness of I know that I know nothing ― which, of course, is true of philosophers and heterodox economists.

For details see

Lars Syll, fake scientist
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2018/01/lars-syll-fake-scientist.html

Fact of life: your econ prof is scientifically incompetent
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/08/fact-of-life-your-econ-prof-is.html

Say hello to Lars Syll, Keynes’ last parrot
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/01/say-hello-to-lars-syll-keyness-last.html

Don Lars and the axiomatic windmill
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/07/don-lars-and-axiomatic-windmill.html

Heterodoxy, too, is scientific junk
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2015/09/heterodoxy-too-is-scientific-junk_85.html

Throw them out! Orthodox and heterodox economists are unfit for science
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/12/throw-them-out-orthodox-and-heterodox.html

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

Kaivey said...

Hi Egmont, what do you think of Single Payer and Britain's National Health Service? I saw in one of your examples you had the government providing health care. Do you think the government should renationalise the railways, and highly regulate or renationalise the energy industries?

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Kaivey

You say “Hi Egmont, what do you think of Single Payer and Britain’s National Health Service? … Do you think the government should renationalise the railways, and highly regulate or renationalise the energy industries?”

I think this is for the Legitimate Sovereign to decide. There is the political realm and the scientific realm and the economist qua scientist must uphold the strict separation of politics and science. This point has been made abundantly clear by J. S. Mill: “A scientific observer or reasoner, merely as such, is not an adviser for practice. His part is only to show that certain consequences follow from certain causes, and that to obtain certain ends, certain means are the most effectual. Whether the ends themselves are such as ought to be pursued, and if so, in what cases and to how great a length, it is no part of his business as a cultivator of science to decide, and science alone will never qualify him for the decision.”#1

For non-economists, the most important thing is to realize is that theoretical economics (= science) had been hijacked from the very beginning by political economists (= agenda pushers). Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years. This applies also to MMT. MMT policy proposals have no sound scientific foundation.#2

I have no truck with the political program of MMT. This is a matter for the UK population to discuss and to decide and no economist has any right to interfere in the political process. Political economists like Krugman, Varoufakis, or Kelton have not to be praised for taking political sides but condemned for corrupting science.

The problem with MMT is not good/bad politics but true/false economic theory. MMTers do either not understand how the monetary economy works or they deceive their fellow citizens about the fact that Public Deficit = Private Profit and that, therefore, MMT policy ultimately benefits the one-percenters, contrary to the political claim that MMT is the champion of the ninety-nine-percenters.#4

The political economist is one of the most disgusting creeps in the Circus Maximus.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 The end of political economics
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/06/the-end-of-political-economics.html

#2 MMT: The one deadly error/fraud of Warren Mosler
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/11/mmt-one-deadly-errorfraud-of-warren.html

#3 MMT = proto-scientific junk + deception of the 99-percenters
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2018/01/mmt-proto-scientific-junk-deception-of.html

#4 MMT and grassroots movements
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2018/01/mmt-and-grassroots-movements.html