Lars P. Syll

R A Fisher — the father of modern statistics (1/4)  [embedded content]

Unquantifiable risk and financial stability Meteorologists and insurers talk about the “1-in-100 year storm”. Should regulators do the same for financial crises? In this post, we argue that false confidence in people’s ability to calculate probabilities of rare events might end up worsening the crises regulators are trying to prevent … Unwarranted faith in the odds of rare events can set the stage for far worse outcomes. No matter how hard we try, we cannot...

Causality — the back-door criterion  [embedded content]

Mitt Romney — hero in times of cowardice [embedded content] And yes, I certainly know what kind of politician Romney is, but here he shows loads of personal courage, and for that, we owe him some respect.

Overcontrolling in econometrics — a wasteful practice ridden with errors The gender pay gap is a fact that, sad to say, to a non-negligible extent is the result of discrimination. And even though many women are not deliberately discriminated against, but rather self-select into lower-wage jobs, this in no way magically explains away the discrimination gap. As decades of socialization research has shown, women may be ‘structural’ victims of impersonal social...

Vinster i välfärden? Nej tack! Att åka till Chile och prata om skolreformer är verkligen som att åka till ett spegelland till Sverige. Systemet och de politiska diskussionerna är så oerhört lika. Men så var Chile också det enda land som tillsammans med oss på allvar testade Rose och Milton Friedmans idéer om skola som en marknad med vinstintressen. I Chiles fall var det eftersom amerikanska ekonomer efter den USA-stödda alliansen fick tillgång till en...

Hicks on the limited applicability of probability calculus When we cannot accept that the observations, along the time-series available to us, are independent, or cannot by some device be divided into groups that can be treated as independent, we get into much deeper water. For we have then, in strict logic, no more than one observation, all of the separate items having to be taken together. For the analysis of that the probability calculus is useless; it...

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The logic of scientific discovery It is because we are material things, possessed of the senses of sight and touch, that we accord priority in verifying existential claims to changes in material things. But scientists posit for these changes both continuants and causes, some of which are necessarily unperceivable. It is true that ‘that a flash or a bang occurs does not entail that anything flashes or bangs. “Let there be light” does not mean “let something...

Heidi Avellan skriver (1/2) att “forskningen visar att det fria skolvalet och fler friskolor är viktiga förklaringar till skolsegregation, det är framför allt resursstarka föräldrar med god ekonomi och hög utbildning som väljer. Lägg till misstanke om betygsinflation och övervinster. ” Men är det bara “övervinster” som är problemet med det unika svenska friskolesystemet? Varför skulle vinster som baseras enkom på skattemedel vara acceptabla så länge de inte är “övervinster”?...