Lars P. Syll

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...

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Moving beyond induction and deduction .[embedded content] In a time when scientific relativism is expanding, it is important to keep up the claim for not reducing science to a pure discursive level. We have to maintain the Enlightenment tradition in which the main task of science is studying the structure of reality. Science is made possible by the fact that there are structures that are durable and independent of our knowledge or beliefs about them. There...

The man who stopped smoking and saved millions of lives .[embedded content]

Randomization — method or madness? Bill Gates has recently been promoting chicken ownership to address poverty in Africa. In an open letter, Professor Blattman of University of Chicago pointed out that cash transfers may be more cost effective than chickens said: “It would be straightforward to run a study with a few thousand people in six countries, and eight or twelve variations, to understand which combination works best, where, and with whom. To me that...

Do RCTs really carry special epistemic weight? Mike Clarke, the Director of the Cochrane Centre in the UK, for example, states on the Centre’s Web site: ‘In a randomized trial, the only difference between the two groups being compared is that of most interest: the intervention under investigation’. This seems clearly to constitute a categorical assertion that by randomizing, all other factors — both known and unknown — are equalized between the experimental...

Taking the con out of RCTs Development actions and interventions (policies/programs/projects/practices) should be based on the evidence. This truism now comes with a radical proposal about the meaning of “the evidence.” In development practice, where there are hundreds of complex, sometimes rapidly changing, contexts seemingly innocuous phrases like “rely on the rigorous evidence” are taken to mean: “Ignore evidence from your context and rely in your...

Bradford Hill — comment trouver de la causalité dans des corrélations .[embedded content]

How to achieve ‘external validity’ There is a lot of discussion in the literature on beginning with experiments and then going on to check “external validity”. But to imagine that there is a scientific way to achieve external validity is, for the most part, a delusion … RCTs do not in themselves tell us anything about the traits of populations in other places and at other times. Hence, no matter how large the population from which we draw our random samples...