Lars P. Syll

Econometric toolbox developers get this year’s ‘Nobel prize’ in economics Many of the big questions in the social sciences deal with cause and effect. How does immigration affect pay and employment levels? How does a longer education affect someone’s future income? … This year’s Laureates have shown that it is possible to answer these and similar questions using natural experiments. The key is to use situations in which chance events or policy changes...

.[embedded content] The term ‘Münchhausen Trilemma’ is used in epistemology to stress the impossibility to prove any truth (even in logic and mathematics). The term was coined by Albert in 1968 in reference to Popper’s Trilemma of dogmatism vs. infinite regress vs. psychologism.

When do regressions give us causality? The issue boils down to this. Does the conditional distribution of Y given X represent mere association, or does it represent the distribution Y would have had if we had intervened and set the values of X? There is a similar question for the distribution of Z given X and Y. These questions cannot be answered just by fitting the equations and doing data analysis on X, Y, and Z. Additional information is needed. From...

I got you babe (personal) .[embedded content] As always for you, Jeanette Meyer.

The defeat and suppression of the classical perspective — with its evolutionary, institutionalist, and developmental descendants — cleared the way for a dogmatic economics that exalted self-regulating competitive markets … As we have seen, this perspective soon ran into serious — but temporary — difficulties with the Great Depression, mass unemployment, and the rise of Keynes, whose theory is revived in Harvard University economist Stephen A. Marglin’s Raising Keynes …...

Mainstream economics — the poverty of fictional story-telling 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...

Lars Vilks (1946-2021) In Memoriam Sad, sad, sad, news reached us yesterday, when this brave artist was reported to have died in a traffic accident. R.I.P.

Hilfe, mein Kind ist FDP-Wähler! [embedded content]

Nu när debatten om vinster i välfärden åter har blommat upp verkar en del politiker och ledarskribenter vilja göra det hela till ett problem med “övervinster.” Men är det bara “övervinster” som är problemet med det unika svenska friskolesystemet? Varför skulle vinster som baseras enkom på skattemedel vara acceptabla så länge de inte är “övervinster”? Friskolekoncerner med många gånger undermålig verksamhet tillåts plocka ut skyhöga vinster. Många politiker tror att problemen...

Is gender a social construct? .[embedded content] Judith Butler’s theory of identity rests on the idea that there is nothing between the Scylla of the metaphysical ‘modernist’ subject and the Charybdis of the totally deconstructed identity where the subject becomes nothing but a fictitious fantasy. But this can’t be right. The social constructivist anti-essentialism is unsatisfactory and ends up in a idealist ‘slippery slope.’ Just shifting a biologically...