Lars P. Syll

It’s not the debt we need to fix, stupid! It’s our thinking. The ad nauseam repeated claim that our public debt is excessive and that we have to balance the public budget is nothing but absolute nonsense. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of mainstream establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour. And the more the citizens have to pay for the concomitant...

The real crises we are facing The fact that 21 percent of all children in the United States live in poverty—that’s a crisis. The fact that our infrastructure is graded at a D+ is a crisis. The fact that inequality today stands at levels last seen during America’s Gilded Age is a crisis. The fact that the typical American worker has seen virtually no real wage growth since the 1970s is a crisis. The fact that forty-four million Americans are saddled with...

July 22, 2011 — a date which will live in infamy .[embedded content] .[embedded content]

Instrumental variables — in search for identification We need relevance and validity. How realistic is validity, anyway? We ideally want our instrument to behave just like randomization in an experiment. But in the real world, how likely is that to actually happen? Or, if it’s an IV that requires control variables to be valid, how confident can we be that the controls really do everything we need them to? In the long-ago times, researchers were happy to...

Causal discovery and the faithfulness assumption (student stuff) .[embedded content] For more on the (questionable) faithfulness assumption, cf. chapter six of Nancy Cartwright’s Hunting causes and using them.

Conditional probabilities (student stuff) .[embedded content]

While the global super-rich are taking joyrides in space Instead of putting billions of dollars into space tourism for the chosen few, think of what that money could have done in saving our climate and helping the poor and suffering in the world. One can have nothing but contempt for these super-rich ego-boosting ethical morons. And as if this wasn’t enough, we have a totally uncritical media reporting on the events. What a disgrace!

Alan Kirman debunking mainstream economics .[embedded content] An economic theory that does not go beyond proving theorems and conditional ‘if-then’ statements — and do not make assertions and put forward hypotheses about real-world individuals and institutions — is of little consequence for anyone wanting to use theories to better understand, explain or predict real-world phenomena. Building theories and models on patently ridiculous assumptions we know...

Which causal inference books to read Source All suggestions are highly readable, but for the general reader, yours truly would also like to recommend The book of why by Pearl & Mackenzie.

Why economics has failed so miserably .[embedded content] The economy is — as emphasised by both Keynes and Soros — pervaded by genuine uncertainty and reflexivity. The uncertainty makes the future difficult to anticipate and reflexivity often makes our expectations about the future something that actually changes the future. They both severely undermine the explanations and predictions that are made  within the standard economic models.