Lars P. Syll

Expected utility theory — a severe case of transmogrifying truth Although the expected utility theory is obviously both theoretically and descriptively inadequate, colleagues and microeconomics textbook writers all over the world gladly continue to use it, as though its deficiencies were unknown or unheard of. Daniel Kahneman writes — in Thinking, Fast and Slow — that expected utility theory is seriously flawed since it doesn’t take into consideration the...

Russian war crimes — Bucha 2022 .[embedded content] Fifty years ago, Olof Palme had this to say about this kind of atrocities: [embedded content]

Multilevel modeling (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Les crimes de guerre de Poutine en Ukraine Des scènes macabres dans une ville dévastée par les combats. Les corps d’au moins vingt hommes portant des vêtements civils gisaient, samedi 2 avril, dans une rue de Boutcha, au nord-ouest de Kiev, que les soldats ukrainiens viennent de reprendre aux forces russes, a constaté sur place un journaliste de l’Agence France-Presse … Seize de la vingtaine de cadavres découverts se trouvaient sur le trottoir ou sur le...

.[embedded content] Un capolavoro!

Putin’s Russia and France’s Far Right In many of his books, pop histories whose conclusions have been vigorously contested by academic historians, Zemmour displays a famously juvenile fandom of Napoleon and promotes an imperial conception of power. In 2018, he said that he dreams of a French Vladimir Putin, a man who “takes a country that was an empire, that could have been a great power, and tries to restore it.” He also wrote in his 2016 book that...

Model validation and significance testing In its standard form, a significance test is not the kind of ‘severe test’ that we are looking for in our search for being able to confirm or disconfirm empirical scientific hypotheses. This is problematic for many reasons, one being that there is a strong tendency to accept the null hypothesis since they can’t be rejected at the standard 5% significance level. In their standard form, significance tests bias against...

Det finanspolitiska ramverket — ett allvarligt feltänk Den ekonomiska krisen i kölvattnet på coronapandemin är inte en vanlig konjunkturnedgång utan en exceptionell situation. Väldiga summor satsas nu för att hålla företag och löntagare under armarna och ge nödhjälp till sjukvården. I coronakrisen spår har majoriteten av drabbade länder i världen ökat sin skuldkvot betydligt. Även i Sverige har skuldkvoten ökat. Denna typ av unika händelse blir därför en...

Den svenska skolans extrema olikvärdighet En intressant fråga är hur stor del av elevernas resultat som skolan egentligen kan förklara. En lämplig utgångspunkt för att ta sig an denna fråga är bilaga 7 i senaste Långtidsutredningen (LU) … I likhet med en likaledes gedigen rapport från Skolverket landar LU i att vilken skola eleverna går på kan förklara mellan 2 och 5 procent av den totala spridningen i elevernas kunskapsresultat. LU sammanfattar med att...

Expected utility theory — nothing but an ex-hypothesis In mainstream theory, preferences are standardly expressed in the form of a utility function. But although the expected utility theory has been known for a long time to be both theoretically and descriptively inadequate, mainstream economists gladly continue to use it, as though its deficiencies were unknown or unheard of. What most of them try to do in face of the obvious theoretical and behavioral...