Lars P. Syll

We live in a world permeated by unmeasurable uncertainty — not quantifiable stochastic risk — which often forces us to make decisions based on anything but ‘rational expectations.’ Our expectations are most often based on the confidence or ‘weight’ we put on different events and alternatives, and the ‘degrees of belief’ on which we weigh probabilities often have preciously little to do with the kind of stochastic probabilistic calculations made by the rational agents as...

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Causal identification requires nonstatistical information in addition to information encoded as data or their probability distributions … This need raises questions of to what extent can inference be codified or automated (which is to say, formalized) in ways that do more good than harm. In this setting, formal models – whether labeled ‘‘causal’’ or ‘‘statistical’’ – serve a crucial but limited role in providing hypothetical scenarios that establish what would be the case if...

Where do you go to my lovely? .[embedded content]

Tax the rich? Yes!

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. Warren Buffett [embedded content] For the first time … researchers have gathered systematic data that allows for a comparison of wealth distributions in all countries of the world, from the bottom of the distribution to the top. The overall conclusion is that wealth hyper-concentration affects all world regions (and it has worsened during the Covid pandemic). At global...

Le pied dans l’plat … and a Happy New Year! [embedded content]

Sweden’s corona strategy — a success story

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One of the limitations with economics is the restricted possibility to perform experiments, forcing it to mainly rely on observational studies for knowledge of real-world economies. But still — the idea of performing laboratory experiments holds a firm grip of our wish to discover (causal) relationships between economic ‘variables.’If we only could isolate and manipulate variables in controlled environments, we would probably find ourselves in a situation where we with greater...