Lars P. Syll

Debating the value of randomization In Social Science and Medicine (December 2017), Angus Deaton & Nancy Cartwright argue that RCTs do not have any warranted special status. They are, simply, far from being the ‘gold standard’ they are usually portrayed as: Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are increasingly popular in the social sciences, not only in medicine. We argue that the lay public, and sometimes researchers, put too much trust in RCTs over...

An MMT perspective on the public debt problem One of the most effective ways of clearing up this most serious of all semantic confusions is to point out that private debt differs from national debt in being external. It is owed by one person to others. That is what makes it burdensome. Because it is interpersonal the proper analogy is not to national debt but to international debt…. But this does not hold for national debt which is owed by the nation to...

Nils van der Poel .[embedded content]

Maktelitens genomsnittliga inkomster före skatt motsvarade 19,9 industri-arbetarlöner 2019, det är samma skillnad som i fjolårets undersökning vilket är den största skillnaden som uppmätts sedan undersökningens startår. År 1950, denna undersöknings första år, motsvarade maktelitens genomsnittliga inkomst 11,1 industriarbetarlöner. 1980 var skillnaden i inkomster mellan maktelit och industriarbetare som minst, maktelitens genomsnittliga inkomst motsvarade då 4,9...

(S) sviker — åter igen — i friskolefrågan Igår meddelade regeringen att den vill skärpa reglerna för religiösa friskolor. Skolminister Lina Axelsson Kihlbom påstod att detta skulle vara “ett viktigt steg för att återta den demokratiska kontrollen i skolan.” Herre du min milde! Och detta grodors plums och ankors plask ska man behöva höra år 2022. Man tager sig för pannan. Att religiösa friskolor över huvud får förekomma i Sverige år 2022 är djupt...

LATE calculation (student stuff) .[embedded content] As Scott Cunningham has it in Causal Inference: The Mixtape: How do you know when you have a good instrument? … A necessary but not sufficient condition for having an instrument that can satisfy the exclusion restriction is if people are confused when you tell them about the instrument’s relationship to the outcome.

.[embedded content] A popular idea in quantitative social sciences is to think of a cause (C) as something that increases the probability of its effect or outcome (O). That is: P(O|C) > P(O|-C) However, as is also well-known, a correlation between two variables, say A and B, does not necessarily imply that that one is a cause of the other, or the other way around, since they may both be an effect of a common cause, C. In statistics and econometrics we usually solve this...

Inverse probability weighting (student stuff) .[embedded content]

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How to deal with the debt obsession .[embedded content]