Lars P. Syll

Randomizations creating illusions of knowledge The advantage of randomised experiments in describing populations creates an illusion of knowledge … This happens because of the propensity of scientific journals to value so-called causal findings and not to value findings where no (so-called) causality is found. In brief, it is arguable that we know less than we think we do. To see this, suppose—as is indeed the case in reality—that thousands of researchers...

En gigant har gått ur tiden .[embedded content] Peps Persson 1946-2021.

L’Afrique du Sud — le pays le plus inégalitaire au monde .[embedded content]

.[embedded content]

What does randomisation guarantee? Nothing! Does not randomization somehow or other guarantee (or perhaps, much more plausibly, provide the nearest thing that we can have to a guarantee) that any possible links to … outcome, aside from the link to treatment …, are broken? Although he does not explicitly make this claim, and although there are issues about how well it sits with his own technical programme, this seems to me the only way in which Pearl...

‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics — worse than useless Mainstream macroeconomics can only progress if it gets rid of the DSGE albatross around its neck. It is better to do it now than to wait for another 20 years because the question is not whether but when DSGE modeling will be discarded. DSGE modeling is a story of a death foretold … Getting rid of DSGE models is critical because the hegemonic DSGE program is crowding out alternative macro methodologies...

Economics — a science in need of a paradigm shift The methodology and ideology of modern economics are built into the frameworks of educational methods, and absorbed by students without any explicit discussion. In particular, the logical positivist philosophy is a deadly poison which I ingested during my Ph.D. training at the Economics Department in Stanford in the late 1970s. It took me years and years to undo these effects … Modern economics is much like...

Orban’s Hungary — a shame for all of Europe .[embedded content]

Why the idea of causation cannot be a purely statistical one If contributions made by statisticians to the understanding of causation are to be taken over with advantage in any specific field of inquiry, then what is crucial is that the right relationship should exist between statistical and subject-matter concerns … Where the ultimate aim of research is not prediction per se but rather causal explanation, an idea of causation that is expressed in terms of...

In support of professor Mas-Colell Estamos profundamente preocupados por las noticias y la situación del profesor Andreu Mas-Colell, uno de los economistas españoles más conocidos y respetados, en el actual procedimiento del Tribunal de Cuentas. El profesor Mas-Colell ha sido catedrático de Economía Louis Berkman en la Universidad de Harvard, editor de Econometrica (una de las principales revistas científicas de economía) y secretario general del Consejo...