Lars P. Syll

This critique goes beyond the narrowly technical — that the workhorse neoclassical model of the economy was found to be lame when it came to running a real crisis race. The deeper critique is that these models, and the technical language that accompanies them, have played a role in policy and in society that has been disproportionate in two senses. First, disproportionate relative to our state of knowledge. Existing economic frameworks have shouldered a policy weight that is...

.[embedded content] I programmet Text och musik med Eric Schüldt — som sänds på söndagsförmiddagarna i P2 mellan klockan 11 och 12 — kan man lyssna på seriös musik och en programledare som har något att säga och inte bara låter foderluckan glappa. I en tid — många kallar den ‘modern’ — då alla förväntar sig omedelbar behovstillfredsställelse här och nu, njuter jag av att få gå och längta efter nästa söndags musikupplevelse och betraktelser över tillvarons mystik....

Axel Leijonhufvud in perspective Axel Leijonhufvud’s sad passing on May 5th has rightly stimulated a round of tributes to a thinker of uncommon breadth. But there is perhaps reason to doubt how widely appreciated the diversity of his thinking really was. Leijonhufvud changed the colors of his economic reasoning in response to many strands of 20th-century discussion, repainting each one. He had an ample palette and his color mixes were always interesting –...

In the real world, it’s my impression that almost all the mediation analyses that people actually fit in the social and medical sciences are misguided: lots of examples where the assumptions aren’t clear and where, in any case, coefficient estimates are hopelessly noisy and where confused people will over-interpret statistical significance … So how to do it? I don’t think traditional path analysis or other multivariate methods of the...

To Ukraine with love .[embedded content] This one is for all my brothers and sisters in Ukraine, fighting oppression and risking your lives on your long walk to freedom. May God be with you. Never give in. Never give up.

Naive Bayes (student stuff) .[embedded content]

‘I sit and talk to God and he just laughs’ .[embedded content]

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IV regression and the difficult art of mimicking randomization We need relevance and validity. How realistic is validity, anyway? We ideally want our instrument to behave just like randomization in an experiment. But in the real world, how likely is that to actually happen? Or, if it’s an IV that requires control variables to be valid, how confident can we be that the controls really do everything we need them to? In the long-ago times, researchers were...

Why economists need to study history .[embedded content]