Lars P. Syll

Statistics and econometrics — science building on fantasy worlds In econometrics one often gets the feeling that many of its practitioners think of it as a kind of automatic inferential machine: input data and out comes casual knowledge. This is like pulling a rabbit from a hat. Great — but first you have to put the rabbit in the hat. And this is where assumptions come into the picture. The assumption of imaginary ‘super populations’ is one of the many...

Why technical fixes will not rescue econometrics On the issue of the various shortcomings of regression analysis and econometrics, no one sums it up better than David Freedman in his Statistical Models and Causal Inference: In my view, regression models are not a particularly good way of doing empirical work in the social sciences today, because the technique depends on knowledge that we do not have. Investigators who use the technique are not paying...

Mainstream economics — replete with arrant nonsense Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that “everyone knows” to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense. For example, “everyone knows” that: • Aggregate production functions (and aggregate measures of the capital stock) provide a good way to characterize the economy’s supply side; • Over a sufficiently long span—specifically, one that allows necessary price adjustments to be made—the economy...

Reinstating the gold standard Ninety years ago Keynes could congratulate Great Britain on finally having got rid of the biggest ”barbarous relic” of his time — the gold standard. He lamented that advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it now is from the spirit and the requirement of the age … [T]he long age of Commodity Money has at last passed away before the age of Representative Money. Gold has ceased to be a coin, a hoard, a...

Facts and values — a critical realist perspective .[embedded content]

Judith Butler — a severe case of postmodern mumbo jumbo .[embedded content] The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural...

.[embedded content]

The great debt debate — Thomas Piketty and Michael Hudson .[embedded content]

‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics — worse than useless Macroeconomic models may be an informative tool for research. But if practitioners of ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics do not investigate and make an effort of providing a justification for the credibility of the assumptions on which they erect their building, it will not fulfill its tasks. There is a gap between its aspirations and its accomplishments, and without more supportive evidence to...

Revisiting Myrdal’s ‘solution’ to the problem of value-bias Recognition of the phenomena of rationalization and mystification as the effects of unconscious interference enables us to pinpoint the error in an influential ‘solution’ to the problem of ‘value-bias’, authorized inter alia by Myrdal. On this solution, recognizing that value-neutrality is impossible, all the social scientist needs to do is state his or her own value assumptions fully and...