Lars P. Syll

.[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]

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In search of identification — instrumental variables 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 happy to...

Anwar Shaikh on alternatives to mainstream economics .[embedded content]

Does economics — really — explain everything? .[embedded content]

Fred Lee on ‘non-knowledge’ mainstream economics The methodological underpinning of neoclassical microeconomics is open to criticisms. The methodological approach of neoclassical economics is based on a pre-vision of supply and demand and/or a Walrasian general equilibrium all combined with scarcity and constrained maximization. Accepting this vision as a matter of faith, neoclassical economists construct axiomatic-based arguments via a deductivist...