Lars P. Syll

How economists reshaped the world [embedded content] To yours truly, the real value of Appelbaum’s meticulously researched history of how economists have come to increasingly influence public policies in modern societies, is that it shows how fundamentally ideological economics is. Of course, you never hear anyone at our seminars telling the lecturer that the assumptions on which his models are built are only made for ideological reasons. But that does not...

And yet the menace of the years shall find me unafraid A great poem. It helped one of the greatest men that has walked this earth keep hope alive during twenty-seven years in prison. Long live his unconquerable soul. [embedded content]

 [embedded content] Non perderti per niente al mondo lo spettacolo di arte varia di un uomo innamorato di te.

Why I am not a Bayesian Assume you’re a Bayesian turkey and hold a nonzero probability belief in the hypothesis H that “people are nice vegetarians that do not eat turkeys and that every day I see the sun rise confirms my belief.” For every day you survive, you update your belief according to Bayes’ Rule P(H|e) = [P(e|H)P(H)]/P(e), where evidence e stands for “not being eaten” and P(e|H) = 1. Given that there do exist other hypotheses than H, P(e) is less...

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E penso a te  [embedded content]

Something repellent clings to the lie, and though the consciousness of this was indeed beaten into one with the old whip, this simultaneously said something about the master of the dungeon. The mistake lies in all too much honesty. Whoever lies, is ashamed, because in every lie they must experience what is degrading in the existing state of the world … Such shame saps the energy of the lies of those who are more subtly organized. They do it badly, and only thereby does the lie...

Econometrics — a crooked path from cause to effect  [embedded content] In their book Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke write: Our first line of attack on the causality problem is a randomized experiment, often called a randomized trial. In a randomized trial, researchers change the causal variables of interest … for a group selected using something like a coin toss. By changing circumstances randomly,...

 [embedded content] This one is for my sons and daughters — David, Tora, Linnea, Sebastian, Amanda.

But once, we were here  [embedded content] One of the greatest movie scenes ever.