Lars P. Syll

Pandemic depression antidote (XXIV) .                                                                                                                           [embedded content]

Do RCTs in education really meet the ‘gold standard’? .                                                                                                                                  [embedded content] Heterogeneity and interaction is not only an external validity problem when trying to ‘export’ regression results to different times or different target populations. It is also often an internal problem to the millions of regression estimates that...

Econometrics in the 21st century .                                                                                                                                 [embedded content] If you don’t have time to listen to all of the presentations (a couple of them are actually quite uninformative) you should at least scroll forward to 1:39:25 and listen to what Angus Deaton has to say. As so often, he is spot on! As Deaton notes, evidence-based theories and...

Coronavirus and educational inequality .                                                                                                                                 [embedded content]

Friskolorna och den bristande likvärdigheten – Jag vet inte hur vi tänkte, men det blev fel med valfriheten i skolan. Det säger nu tidigare S-finansministern Kjell-Olof Feldt till SVT. – Problemet är likvärdigheten, menar Kjell-Ollof Feldt. De duktiga eleverna söker sig till samma skolor, det gör att de halvbra skolorna dräneras på bra elever, och dras ner till fler och fler problemskolor. Det måste dagens politiker våga sätta stopp för. Kjell Olof Feldt...

.                                                                                                                                        [embedded content] Bille August’s and Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece. With breathtakingly beautiful music by Stefan Nilsson.

Has mainstream economics — really — gone through a pluralist and empirical revolution? In an issue of the journal Fronesis yours truly and a couple of other academics (e.g. Julie Nelson, Tony Lawson, and Phil Mirowski) made an effort at introducing its readers to heterodox economics and its critique of mainstream economics. Rather unsurprisingly this hasn’t pleased the Swedish economics establishment. On the mainstream economics blog Ekonomistas, professor...

Paul Samuelson and the ergodic hypothesis Paul Samuelson claimed that the “ergodic hypothesis” is essential for advancing economics from the realm of history to the realm of science. But is it really tenable to assume that ergodicity is essential to economics? The answer can only be – as I have argued here here here here and here – NO WAY! Obviously yours truly is far from the only scientist being critical of Paul Samuelson. This is what Ole Peters writes...

Joke of the year .                                                                                                                                [embedded content]

Using ‘small-world’ models in a large world Radical uncertainty arises when we know something, but not enough to enable us to act with confidence. And that is a situation we all too frequently encounter … The language and mathematics of probability is a compelling way of analysing games of chance. And similar models have proved useful in some branches of physics. Probabilities can also be used to describe overall mortality risk just as they also form the...