Lars P. Syll

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Everybody’s got to learn sometime .[embedded content]

Angus Deaton: ‘The war on poverty has become a war on the poor’ When Angus Deaton arrived in the US four decades ago, he imagined he had something to say about economic inequality and how to tackle it that Americans might want to hear. Instead, the great economic minds of the time told him to shut up … As Deaton describes in his unsparing new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, he soon realized he had run...

‘Nobel Prize’ winner Claudia Goldin helps you get your econ papers published We do not instruct our students well in the art of crafting papers, possibly because there are so many idiosyncratic elements. Editing or refereeing manuscripts teaches us what distinguishes a well-crafted paper from an ordinary one. We should take on these chores not only because they are public services but also because they are the only means of learning how to write. Reading...

Economics and the way the world works With any phenomenon of interest, understanding its nature or essential properties allows us to relate to, or interact with, it in more knowledgeable and competent ways than would otherwise be the case … A surprising number of social theorists, when embarking on substantive analyses, pay almost no attention at all to insights bearing on the nature of these (or any other) factors. Instead, the preferred option is to...

Ekonomi — vetenskap eller gissningslek? Är nationalekonomi vetenskapligt baserad kunskap? Kan man förutspå hur enskilda individer eller hela samhällen kommer att agera ekonomiskt? Till exempel om miljonbonusar gör toppchefer mer lojala mot de företag som anställt dom? Kan ekonomiska analytiker verkligen se in i framtiden och förutspå kommande kriser? Eller handlar ekonomernas prognoser mer om en kvalificerad gissningslek? Yours truly försöker ge svar på de...

Statistical methods and empirical research David A. Freedman‘s Statistical Models: Theory and Practice (2009) is a marvellous book. It should be mandatory reading for every serious social scientist — including economists and econometricians — who don’t want to succumb to ad hoc assumptions and unsupported statistical conclusions! In the social and behavioral sciences, far-reaching claims are often made for the superiority of advanced quantitative methods —...

Professorn som är Sveriges Doktor Pangloss Vem det är — och varför han är det — kan du läsa om i den här artikeln av yours truly i Magasinet Konkret.

We who like to imagine ourselves responsible for the public’s knowledge of society despise description and indeed despise the methods that are generally used for quantitative description. Our social indicators are simply disaggre­gated variables, ready for input to causal analysis. The notions of complex combinatoric description, of typologies based on multiple variables — these fill the average sociologist with disgust. Our disgust is disingenuous, for ease of computing has...

Randomization-based vs. model-based inference .[embedded content]