Lars P. Syll

Statistics is no substitute for thinking The cost of computing has dropped exponentially, but the cost of thinking is what it always was. That is why we see so many articles with so many regressions and so little thought. Zvi Griliches

Ett sista glas (personal) År 2018 var — precis som de flesta år — ett år med både glädje och sorg. För mig kommer året ändå alltid att främst förknipppas med att det var året då min bäste vän sen mer än trettio år  — Bengt Nilsson — gick ur tiden. Inga ord kan riktigt beskriva vad man känner när en människa man älskat inte längre finns där. Man minns skratten, glädjen, omtanken, den mäktiga intelligensen, den drastiska humorn, och det starka sociala...

How to re-establish​​ trust in economics as a science Students all over the world are increasingly questioning if the kind of economics they are taught — mainstream economics — really is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics is a science. Two ‘Nobel laureates’ in economics — Robert Shiller and Paul Krugman — have lately tried to respond: Critics of “economic sciences” sometimes refer to the development of a “pseudoscience” of...

Confessions of scientific​ fraud Even with my various “grey” methods for “improving” the data, I wasn’t able to get the results the way I wanted them. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go a step further. I wanted it so badly … I opened the file with the data that I had entered and changed an unexpected 2 into a 4; then, a little further along, I changed a 3 into a 5. It didn’t feel right. I looked around me nervously. The data danced in front of my eyes....

In advanced economics the question would be: ‘What besides mathematics should be in an economics lecture?’ In physics the familiar spirit is Archimedes the experimenter. But in economics, as in mathematics itself, it is theorem-proving Euclid who paces the halls … Economics … has become a mathematical game. The science has been drained out of economics, replaced by a Nintendo game of assumption-making … Most thoughtful economists think that the games on the blackboard and the...

Dags för flumpedagogers självrannsakan I dag kan vi se resultatet av nittiotalets pedagogiska ‘upplysning’. Undersökningar som PISA och TIMSS ger klara besked, den svenska skolan har försämrats på ett sätt som saknar motstycke i internationella mätningar … Det vore kanske på sin plats att vi rannsakade oss själva och den skoldebatt vi fört under de senaste tjugo åren. En sådan avbön från nittiotalets idéer om den goda läraren skulle vara ett väsentligt...

Why your friends are more popular than you are  [embedded content]

Putting sticky-price DSGE lipstick on the RBC pig ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists have for years been arguing (e.g. here) about the importance of the New Classical counter-revolution in economics. ‘Helping’ to change the way macroeconomics is done today — with rational expectations, Euler equations, intertemporal optimization and microfoundations — their main critique of New Classical macroeconomics is that it didn’t incorporate price stickiness into the...

The essence of scientific reasoning In deductive reasoning all knowledge obtainable is already latent in the postulates. Rigour is needed to prevent the successive inferences growing less and less accurate as we proceed. The conclusions are never more accurate than the data. In inductive reasoning we are performing part of the process by which new knowledge is created. The conclusions normally grow more and more accurate as more data are included. It should...

The greatest of them all  [embedded content] Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)