Lars P. Syll

When usefulness is more important than precision This is a bit like a physicist saying, “Throwing a cricket ball at a window doesn’t cause it to break. Rather, giving an object of approximately spherical shape with a given density a certain velocity in a fluid medium of a certain density and viscosity within a gravitational field of a certain magnitude causes a silicone-based compound in a certain quantity of certain dimensions with certain reflective and...

The Tree of Life . [embedded content]

Wenn die Logik des Haushalts nicht die des Staates ist Im Februar 2024 kündigte die französische Regierung ein Sparpaket von 10 Mrd. € an, um das fiskalische Defizit zu senken. Politico berichtete: “Wir verdienen weniger, wir geben weniger aus”, sagt Finanzminister Bruno Le Maire. Diese Logik gilt zwar für einen Haushalt, aber nicht für eine nationale Regierung wie die von Frankreich. Warum? … Wenn Frankreich die Staatsausgaben kürzt und die anderen...

.[embedded content] For more on the pitfalls and intricacies of statistical tests and confidence intervals, have a look at this article by Sander Greenland et al.

Race and sex as causes In the potential outcomes approach to causality, sex and race are often not considered causes since they do not fit within this counterfactual manipulation/intervention framework of causal inference. Sex and race cannot be directly manipulated or intervened on, which is said to make it difficult to conceptualize what the ‘potential outcomes’ would be for individuals if they were of a different sex or race.  This leaves us in a...

What economics can learn from epidemiology In mainstream economics nowadays there seems to be a broad consensus that one somehow can establish general truths about things by simply generalizing from lots of individual RCTs. But as is well-known among philosophers of science, this kind of inference, based on induction by simple enumeration, is highly flawed. And there are alternatives: The striking feature of paradigmatic epidemiology is that evidence comes...

Assar Lindbeck — a Hayekian neoliberal Lindbeck’s interactions with the New Left and Neo-Malthusians, focusing on issues like environmental sustainability and social justice, exemplify how his authorship developed in an antagonistic context against his interlocutors. He used Hayekian epistemology to counter the grievances of his adversaries, arguing that market mechanisms were superior in addressing environmental and social challenges that he...

Warum ist Schottland so woke? Schottland verabschiedete am 1. April ein Gesetz gegen “Hasskriminalität”, das “boshafte Äußerungen” gegen Minderheiten selbst dann strafbar macht, wenn sie in den eigenen vier Wänden getätigt werden. “Ich bin gerade nicht im Land”, kommentierte die Edinburgher Harry Potter-Autorin J. K. Rowling auf X das neue Strafrecht, “aber ich freue mich schon darauf, festgenommen zu werden, wenn ich zurückkehre an den Geburtsort der...

Are we all behavioural economists now? While neoclassical economists cannot consistently incorporate behavioral factors into their models, there is nothing in behavioral economics that makes the use of neoclassical theory illegitimate. To the contrary … behavioral economists have consistently advocated using neoclassical theory for all sorts of purposes. By and large, they treat neoclassical models and theories as heuristic devices or analytical tools,...

What kind of ‘rigour’ do RCTs provide? The bad news is, first, that there is no reason in general to suppose that an ATE [Average Treatment Effect] observed in one population will hold in others. That is what the slogan widespread now in education and elsewhere registers: “Context matters”.  The issue in this paper is not though about when we can expect a study result to hold elsewhere but rather when we can have EBPP-style [Evidence-Based Policy and...