Lars P. Syll

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The atomistic fallacy explained …  [embedded content]

Statistics and mathematics — not very helpful for understanding economies Statistical science is not really very helpful for understanding or forecasting complex evolving self-healing organic ambiguous social systems – economies, in other words. A statistician may have done the programming, but when you press a button on a computer keyboard and ask the computer to find some good patterns, better get clear a sad fact: computers do not think. They do exactly...

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In most econometrics textbooks the authors give an interpretation of a linear regression such as Y = a + bX, saying that a one-unit increase in X (years of education) will cause a b unit increase in Y (wages). Dealing with time-series regressions this may well be OK. The problem is that this ‘dynamic’ interpretation of b is standardly also given as the ‘explanation’ of the slope coefficient for cross-sectional data. But in that case, the only increase that can generally come...

In the late 80s half of 25-34 year-olds owned their own home. Now, only a quarter do. This has changed how young people vote. But what exactly is the mechanism here? I’m not sure that it is simple mechanical self-interested support for specific policies … Instead, what’s going on is a change of identity. In the 80s, many young people identified themselves as property-owners and voted accordingly. Today, they see themselves as propertyless and so vote Labour. There’s a reason...

Low interest rates and leveraged loans — a dangerous combination A la longue, l’environnement de taux d’intérêt très bas a fini par désorienter les investisseurs et les professionnels des marchés financiers. Puisque placer de l’argent dans des fonds obligataires ne rapporte quasiment rien et que de nombreux titres s’échangent désormais sur des niveaux de taux de rendement négatifs, les hedge funds, mais aussi de grandes compagnies d’assurances et des fonds...

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No reality, please. We’re economists! Mathematics, especially through the work of David Hilbert, became increasingly viewed as a discipline properly concerned with providing a pool of frameworks for possible realities. No longer was mathematics seen as the language of (non-social) nature, abstracted from the study of the latter. Rather, it was conceived as a practice concerned with formulating systems comprising sets of axioms and their deductive...

Schwarzer Tag in der deutschen Geschichte  [embedded content]