Lars P. Syll

Econometrics — junk science with no relevance whatsoever to real-world economics Do you believe that 10 to 20% of the decline in crime in the 1990s was caused by an increase in abortions in the 1970s? Or that the murder rate would have increased by 250% since 1974 if the United States had not built so many new prisons? Did you believe predictions that the welfare reform of the 1990s wouldforce 1,100,000 children into poverty? If you were misled by any of...

Seyla Benhabib und Rainer Forst über Habermas  [embedded content]

The experimental approach to global poverty  [embedded content]

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L’un part, l’autre reste  [embedded content]

‘Nobel prize’ winner Esther Duflo on how to fight poverty  [embedded content] Today The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2019 to Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. Great choice! In one single stroke the academy doubled the number of women having received the ‘Nobel prize’ in economics. Compared with most other recipients for...

On the limited applicability of game theory Many mainstream economists – still — think that game theory is useful and can be applied to real-life and give important and interesting results. That, however, is a rather unsubstantiated view. What game theory does is, strictly seen, nothing more than investigating the logic of behaviour among non-existant robot-imitations of humans. Knowing how those ‘rational fools’ play games do not help us to decide and act...

The limits of extrapolation in economics There are two basic challenges that confront any account of extrapolation that seeks to resolve the shortcomings of simple induction. One challenge, which I call extrapolator’s circle, arises from the fact that extrapolation is worthwhile only when there are important limitations on what one can learn about the target by studying it directly. The challenge, then, is to explain how the suitability of the model as a...

Das Jahr in dem die Mauer fiel  [embedded content] Herausragende Dokumentation. Ohne Tränen kann man das nicht gucken.

Humble Nobel prize winner …  [embedded content]