Lars P. Syll

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Propensity score matching vs. regression (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Wittgensteins Sprachphilosophie — der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen .[embedded content]

Le vaccin d’AstraZeneca et la balance bénéfice-risque .[embedded content]

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There is something about the way macroeconomists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. Empirical evidence — still — only plays a minor role in mainstream economics, where models largely function as a substitute for empirical evidence. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretences during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modeling as the...

David Graeber on the importance of Roy Bhaskar’s work .[embedded content] No philosopher of science has influenced yours truly’s thinking more than Roy Bhaskar did. Roy always emphasised that the world itself should never be conflated with the knowledge we have of it. Science can only produce meaningful, relevant and realist knowledge if it acknowledges its dependence of the​ world out there. Ultimately that also means that the critique yours truly wages...

Gedankenexperiment — John Rawls .[embedded content]

Mainstream economics has sadly made economics increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. Trying to contribute in making economics a more realist and relevant science, yours truly launched this blog in March 2011. Now, ten years later and with millions of page views on it, yours truly is — together with people like e.g. Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman — ranked on INOMICS’ The Top Economics Blogs list. I am — of course — truly awed, honoured and delighted....

On the limits of formal methods in causal inference Our problem is … with the temptation to think that by stating some of our assumptions more clearly, we have successfully formalized the entire inferential process … Science may indeed seek objectivity, and for this reason a deductive method for causal inference is indeed highly desirable. But this does not mean that it is possible: we cannot have one just because we decide we need one. Causal conclusions...