Lars P. Syll

 [embedded content] Les sentiments amoureux résumé en 4 minutes sublimes.

Ti voglio così come sei  [embedded content] Le canzoni di questa cantautore mi hanno sempre emozionato. È grandissimo Peppino!

Chicago economics — a bit out of touch with the real world Tom Sargent is a bit out of touch with the real world up there in his office … Certain people have a capacity for ignoring facts which are patenty obvious, but are counter to their view of the world; so they just ignore them … Sargent is a sort of tinkerer, playing an intellectual game. He looks at a puzzle to see if h ecan solve it in a particular way, exercising these fancy techniques. Alan...

 [embedded content] Un chanteur sans compromission. Toujours extra.

Assar Lindbeck skriver i DN (20200106) tillsammans med Mats Persson (L) att Sverige är illa rustat för fortsatt invandring. Få personer har haft ett så stort inflytande på den svenska samhällsutvecklingen under det senaste halvseklet som Lindbeck. Om Sverige är illa rustat ekonomiskt och politiskt beror det mycket på honom. Assar Lindbeck är en av de mest inflytelserika nationalekonomer Sverige haft. Under en epok, då nationalekonomer har betraktats som sanningsägande guruer...

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La discipline économique et le mirage de la ‘vraie science’ Le mirage de la « vraie science », dont la puissance fantasmatique est immense chez les économistes, met sur la voie d’une autre catégorie canguilhemienne, qui permet peut-être de donner sa qualification la plus précise à la situation épistémologique de l’économie : il s’agit de la catégorie « d’idéologie scientifique » … La catégorie d’idéologie scientifique est d’abord purement interne au...

Econometric modelling as junk science Do you believe that 10 to 20% of the decline in crime in the 1990s was caused by an increase in abortions in the 1970s? Or that the murder rate would have increased by 250% since 1974 if the United States had not built so many new prisons? Did you believe predictions that the welfare reform of the 1990s would force 1,100,000 children into poverty? If you were misled by any of these studies, you may have fallen for a...

Econometrics — the signal-to-noise problem When we first encounter the term, “noisy data,” in econometrics, we are usually told that it refers to the problem of measurement error, or errors-in-variables—especially in the explanatory variables (x). Most textbooks contain a discussion of measurement error bias. In the case of a bivariate regression, y = a + bx + u, measurement error in x means the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator is biased. The...

Debating econometrics and its short-comings yours truly often gets the response from econometricians that “ok, maybe econometrics isn’t perfect, but you have to admit that it is a great technique for empirical testing of economic hypotheses.” But is econometrics — really — such a great testing instrument? Econometrics is supposed to be able to test economic theories but to serve as a testing device you have to make many assumptions, many of which themselves cannot be tested or...