Monday, January 25, 2021

Lars P. Syll — Mainstream economics — a waste of time on a staggering scale

Why models fail.

As a philosophy professor, I taught logic and critical thinking as part of the introductory course. This involved a cursory study of methodology. 

Part of the course is about methods of correct reasoning and part about incorrect. The part about incorrect reasoning is about identifying arguments that sound great but are just wrong and showing why they are wrong. 

This part seems to have been overlook in teaching introductory economics and apparently some (many?) economists never get the message.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Mainstream economics — a waste of time on a staggering scale
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

5 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Mainstream economics - a roaring success for academics, authors, and other moochers.

Andrew Anderson said...

I taught logic and critical thinking Tom Hickey

And Yves Smith claims her site is to "promote critical thinking." Yet she won't tolerate any arguments in favor of completely de-privileging banks.

Nor does the MMT School and presumably yourself, too.

This despite the fact that government-privileged (including government-owned) banks have been a cause of problems for centuries and are inherently unjust in that the public's credit is used for private gain, be it wealth and/or political power.

Interestingly, Revelation 9:20-21 says:

The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, so as not to worship demons, and the idols of gold and of silver and of brass and of stone and of wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk; and they did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts. [bold added]

Matt Franko said...

“The part about incorrect reasoning is about identifying arguments that sound great but are just wrong and showing why they are wrong. “

Wrong.... There is nothing in the dialogic method that says you have to yield to your interlocutors antithesis...

Tom Hickey said...



Uh, you are in the wrong ballpark.

Matt Franko said...

uh no... where is your testing?

this process has to be mediated by a 3rd party in some sort of position of judicial authority...

an alternative method (science) involves testing instead of use of a neutral 3rd party...

if you maintain a dialogic method, you leave it up to just the two parties with the thesis and antithesis they will not decide one way or the other... the "best" you get is a synthesis of the two opposing theses...