Lars P. Syll

That’s the right spirit for coping with the coronavirus lockdown!  [embedded content]

Statistical models for causation — a critical review Causal inferences can be drawn from nonexperimental data. However, no mechanical rules can be laid down for the activity. Since Hume, that is almost a truism. Instead, causal inference seems to require an enormous investment of skill, intelligence, and hard work. Many convergent lines of evidence must be developed. Natural variation needs to be identified and exploited. Data must be collected. Confounders...

Requiem for my friend  [embedded content] In loving memory of Bengt Nilsson — a friend non plus ultra.

Are we all behavioural economists now? Postwar neoclassical economics was a reaction against a set of approaches based on the principles of hedonic psychology … Various developments in positive and normative economics had reassured them that references to unobservable entities were not only illegitimate but also dispensable. Thus, the concept of preference came to be the primitive notion of economic theory, and references to psychological theory were to be...

Judea Pearl and interventionist causal models (wonkish) As X’s effect on some other variable in the system S depends on there being a possible intervention on X, and the possibility of an intervention in turn depends on the modularity of S, it is a necessary condition for something to be a cause that the system in which it is a cause is modular with respect to that factor. The requirement that all systems are modular with respect to their causes can, in a...

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 [embedded content] Filmer kan beröra oss på många olika sätt. Många är mest inget annat än rent tidsfördriv och eskapism. Men det finns också några — få — filmer som verkligen betyder något. De riktigt stora filmerna. De som på allvar tränger in under huden och skakar om oss i vårt innersta. Kjell-Åke Anderssons filmatisering av Göran Tunströms mästerverk Juloratoriet — med gudabenådad musik av Stefan Nilsson — är en sådan film. En av de sorgligaste filmer jag vet. Men kanske...

Randomness and probability — a theoretical reexamination Modern probabilistic econometrics relies on the notion of probability. To at all be amenable to econometric analysis, economic observations allegedly have to be conceived as random events. But is it really necessary to model the economic system as a system where randomness can only be analyzed and understood when based on an a priori notion of probability? In probabilistic econometrics, events and...

Keynes vs the Stockholm School approach to economics The Stockholm method seems to me exactly the right way to explain business-cycle downturns … But the “problem” with the Stockholm method was that it was open-ended. It could offer only “a wide variety” of “model sequences,” without specifying a determinate solution. It was just this gap in the Stockholm approach that Keynes was able to fill. He provided a determinate equilibrium, “the limit to which the...

Hommage à Max von Sydow  [embedded content] Max von Sydow was a Swedish actor who featured in more than 100 films and TV series. He made many memorable film roles, but the one that touched me most was as the father in Pelle Erobreren — based on Martin Andersen Nexö’s epic masterpiece. Bille August directed. Stefan Nilsson wrote the music. Max von Sydow made the performance of his life. And it breaks my heart every time I watch it. A legend has died. Long...