Sunday, May 8, 2016

Lars P. Syll — The biggest mistake in the history of macroeconomic thought


Roger Farmer on Paul Samuelson's tragic mistake in synthesizing Keynes and neoclassical economic.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
The biggest mistake in the history of macroeconomic thought
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

3 comments:

Ralph Musgrave said...

Very odd claim by Roger Farmer in that article. He claims to have originated the idea that “..high involuntary unemployment is an equilibrium phenomenon. A market economy can get stuck in a Pareto inefficient equilibrium with high unemployment forever.”
That was Keynes’s basic insight, wasn’t it?

Ramanan said...

Stupidity.

I am unsure as to why Lars Syll is a bit praisy of Roger Farmer.

"The Keynesian economics of the General Theory is static"

That's such a ROFL statement. I mean Joan Robinson tried so hard to get a dynamical model of the world across with General Theory as the base.

MRW said...

Ramanan, you might want to read Paul Davidson's Appendix—Why Keynes’s Ideas Were Never Taught in American Universities, which one NYC commenter said on Amazon was worth the price of the book alone.

I made a copy from my Kindle purchase. I uploaded it here. don’t know how ;long it will stay available.
http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=01473303225190497023

Davidson substantiates Farmer’s claim with facts and interviews. Davidson also can be heard on a couple of youbies discussing this. Hicks told Davidson directly that he discovered he was wrong, but he didn’t didn’t a chance to fix it before he died.

Farmer:
"Samuelson, in the new-classical synthesis, used the Phillips curve, which he saw as a price adjustment mechanism in which the wage adjusts in response to an excess demand or supply of labor. This was the biggest mistake in the history of macroeconomic thought and we are still suffering the consequences as central banks work with false ideas and broken models."