Lars P. Syll

What RCTs can and cannot tell us We seek to promote an approach to RCTs that is tentative in its claims and that avoids simplistic generalisations about causality and replaces these with more nuanced and grounded accounts that acknowledge uncertainty, plausibility and statistical probability … Whilst promoting the use of RCTs in education we also need to be acutely aware of their limitations … Whilst the strength of an RCT rests on strong internal validity,...

Your model is internally consistent? So what! ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomist Simon Wren-Lewis has a post on his blog discussing how evidence is treated in modern macroeconomics (emphasis added): The unique property that DSGE models have is internal consistency. Take a DSGE model, and alter a few equations so that they fit the data much better, and you have what could be called a structural econometric model. It is internally inconsistent, but because it...

‘Controlling for’ — a methodological urban legend Trying to reduce the risk of having established only ‘spurious relations’ when dealing with observational data, statisticians and econometricians standardly add control variables. The hope is that one thereby will be able to make more reliable causal inferences. But — as Keynes showed already back in the 1930s when criticizing statistical-econometric applications of regression analysis — if you do not manage...

Horace Engdahl — mannen som gett postmodern ryggradslöshet ett ansikte Om det, mot förmodan, fortfarande skulle råka föreligga minsta tvivel om vad fransk-inspirerad postmodernism leder till inom humaniora och samhällsvetenskap, föreslår jag ödmjukast att ni tar en titt på den här mannen. Horace Engdahl har så länge han figurerat i media — på 1980- och 1990-talen mest i DN och Kris, numera oftast i en TV nära dig — signalerat att nu är det dags för...

DSGE — models built on shaky ground In most aspects of their lives humans must plan forwards. They take decisions today that affect their future in complex interactions with the decisions of others. When taking such decisions, the available information is only ever a subset of the universe of past and present information, as no individual or group of individuals can be aware of all the relevant information. Hence, views or expectations about the future,...

Economic crises and uncertainty The financial crisis of 2007-08 hit most laymen and economists with surprise. What was it that went wrong with our macroeconomic models, since they obviously did not foresee the collapse or even make it conceivable? There are many who have ventured to answer this question. And they have come up with a variety of answers, ranging from the exaggerated mathematization of economics to irrational and corrupt politicians. But the...

The importance of studying economics Advertisements

Scott Page’s new book is a great introduction on how to use and evaluate different kinds of mathematical models in the social sciences. Yours truly will be back soon for a lengthy review, but let me just notice that — as I have over and over again emphasized on this blog — Page underscores that if we want to explain social phenomena, relations and structures, we have to go beyond data. Data do not speak for themselves. Without theory and a search for mechanisms and deep...

DIE ZEIT: Herr Mansour, Sie kommen aus Israel, einem Land, das so gespalten ist, dass Sie es dort nicht mehr ausgehalten haben. Wie geht es Ihnen gerade mit Deutschland? Ahmad Mansour: Sehr schlecht. Ich habe das Gefühl, dass man sich hier zunehmend schwertut, Debatten um emotionale Themen sachlich zu führen. Seit 2015 mein Buch Generation Allah erschien, in dem ich erkläre, dass der Islam eine Mitverantwortung für die Entstehung von Terrorgruppen hat, lebe ich mit...

Paul Krugman has repeatedly over the years argued that we should continue to use maistream economics hobby horses like IS-LM and AS-AD models. Here’s one example: So why do AS-AD? … We do want, somewhere along the way, to get across the notion of the self-correcting economy, the notion that in the long run, we may all be dead, but that we also have a tendency to return to full employment via price flexibility. Or to put it differently, you do want somehow to make clear the...