Lars P. Syll

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P-values are no substitute for thinking  [embedded content] A non-trivial part of statistics education is made up of teaching students to perform significance testing. A problem I have noticed repeatedly over the years, however, is that no matter how careful you try to be in explicating what the probabilities generated by these statistical tests really are, still most students misinterpret them. This is not to blame on students’ ignorance, but rather on...

Listen to BBC 4 where Duncan Weldon tries to explain in what way Hyman Minsky’s thoughts on banking and finance offer a radical challenge to mainstream economic theory. As a young research stipendiate in the U.S. yours truly had the great pleasure and privelege of having Hyman Minsky as teacher. He was a great inspiration at the time. He still is. Advertisements

Gender pay gap and transparency Es wird oft vermutet, dass mehr Transparenz hier Abhilfe schaffen könnte: Wenn alle wüssten, was alle verdienen – dann wären diese Unterschiede nicht länger haltbar. Die zu kurz Gekommenen würden protestieren, mehr fordern und so für mehr Gleichheit und Gerechtigkeit sorgen. Seit dem 6. Januar dieses Jahres haben Beschäftigte ein Recht darauf zu erfahren, wie viel Kollegen beziehungsweise Kolleginnen des jeweils anderen...

En av Sveriges främsta och mest uppslagsrika sociologer — Johan Asplund (1937-2018) har gått ur tiden. När yours truly som ung student på 1970-talet läste några betyg i sociologi, var en av mina stora inspirationskällor Johan Asplunds underbara lilla klassiker Om mättnadsprocesser (Argos 1967). Jag tror den känsla många av oss har inför samhällsutvecklingens “kvalitetsförbättringar” är inte så lite av “rulla ut röda mattan och rulla in den bakom oss.” Asplunds funderingar...

On health and inequality  [embedded content] Advertisements

Twenty-five years ago Phil Mirowski was invited to give a speech on themes from his book More Heat than Light at my old economics department in Lund, Sweden. All the mainstream professors were there. Their theories were totally mangled and no one — absolutely no one — had anything to say even remotely reminiscent of a defence. Being at a nonplus, one of them, in total desperation, finally asked: “But what shall we do then?” Yes indeed — what shall they do? Because, sure, they...

Blacklisted economics professor found dead Professor Outis Philalithopoulos was found dead in his home three days ago; the coroner’s report cited natural causes that were left unspecified. Unfortunately, all of the professor’s academic work has disappeared; the only trace left appears to be the following letter, which he sent to an admirer shortly before his death. The understandably concerned recipient of the letter has shared its contents with Naked...

Was heißt es in einem reichen Land arm zu sein?  #Unten illustriert, was die versammelte deutsche Bildungsforschung seit Jahren stets aufs Neue nachgewiesen hat. Die Herkunft bestimmt, insbesondere in Deutschland, den Lebensweg, wer unten geboren wird, der bleibt in der Regel dort. Der soziale Aufstieg wird zum unerreichbaren Ziel. Doch sind es in den sozialen Netzwerken vor allem die Aufsteiger, die unter dem Hashtag von ihren Erfahrungen berichten. Jene,...

In a post on his blog, Oxford macroeconomist Simon Wren-Lewis discusses if modern academic macroeconomics is eclectic or not. When it comes to methodology it seems as though his conclusion is that it is not: The New Classical Counter Revolution of the 1970s and 1980s … was primarily a revolution about methodology, about arguing that all models should be microfounded, and in terms of mainstream macro it was completely successful … Mainstream academic macro is very eclectic in...