Lars P. Syll

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NAIRU — closer to religion than science Once we see how weak the foundations for the natural rate of unemployment are, other arguments for pursuing rates of unemployment economists once thought impossible become more clear. Wages can increase at the expense of corporate profits without causing inflation … The harder we push on improving output and employment, the more we learn how much we can achieve on those two fronts. That hopeful idea is the polar...

Mainstream economics finally made it … Wooh! So this is reality!

NAIRU — a harmful fairy tale The NAIRU story has always had a very clear policy implication — attempts to promote full employment is doomed to fail, since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation. Althouigh a lot of mainstream economists and politicians have a touching faith in the NAIRU fairy tale, it doesn’t hold water when scrutinized. One of the main problems...

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If thou hast shown mercy [embedded content] If thou hast shown mercy unto man, o man, that same mercy shall be shown thee there; and if on an orphan thou hast shown compassion, that same shall there deliver thee from want. If in this life the naked thou hast clothed, the same shall give thee shelter there, and sing the psalm: Alleluia.

On logic and science Suppose you conducted an observational study to identify the effect of heart transplant A on death Y and that you assumed no unmeasured confounding given disease severity L. A critic of your study says “the inferences from this observational study may be incorrect because of potential confounding.” The critic is not making a scientific statement, but a logical one. Since the findings from any observational study may be confounded, it is...

The compulsive types there correspond to the paranoids here. The wistful opposition to factual research, the legitimate consciousness that scientism forgets what is best, exacerbates through its naïvété the split from which it suffers. Instead of comprehending the facts, behind which others are barricaded, it hurriedly throws together whatever it can grab from them, rushing off to play so uncritically with apochryphal cognitions, with a couple isolated and hypostatized...

‘We read to know we are not alone’ .[embedded content]

How scientists manipulate research [embedded content]All science entails human judgment, and using statistical models doesn’t relieve us of that necessity. Working with misspecified models, the scientific value of significance testing is actually zero — even though you’re making valid statistical inferences! Statistical models and concomitant significance tests are no substitutes for doing real science. In its standard form, a significance test is not the...