Lars P. Syll

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever  [embedded content]

I förra veckan var yours truly inbjuden att i Roskilde opponera på  Mogens Ove Madsens Ph.D avhandling Tidsaspekter i Keynesiansk teori. Låt mig här därför ta tillfället i akt och ge några synpunkter på den med framgång försvarade avhandlingen. Ett ofta diskuterat problem (för många uppfattat som en paradox) inom Keynesforskningen handlar om dennes till synes statiska framställningssätt i General Theory. Enligt Madsen är det av avgörande betydelse förstå att det för Keynes när...

Confusing statistics and research Coupled with downright incompetence in statistics, we often find the syndrome that I have come to call statisticism: the notion that computing is synonymous with doing research, the naïve faith that statistics is a complete or sufficient basis for scientific methodology, the superstition that statistical formulas exist for evaluating such things as the relative merits of different substantive theories or the “importance”...

Trying to synthesize Marx and Keynes  [embedded content]

 [embedded content] Elton John — one of the greatest musical geniuses of the twentieth century.

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Game theory — a scientific cul-de-sac  [embedded content] Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision-making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, ​it is...

 [embedded content] Monica Bellucci dans le film Malèna.

We can either let theory guide us in our attempt to estimate causal relationships from data … or we don’t let theory guide us. If we let theory guide us, our causal inferences will be ‘incredible’ because our theoretical knowledge is itself not certain … If we do not let theory guide us, we have no good reason to believe that our causal conclusions are true either of the experimental population or of other populations because we have no understanding of the mechanisms that are...