Lars P. Syll

At the University of Chicago, where I went to graduate school, they sell a t-shirt that says “that’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?” That ode to nerdiness in the ivory tower captures the state of knowledge about rising wealth inequality, both its causes and its consequences. Economic models of the distribution of wealth tend to assume that it is “stationary.” In other words, some people become wealthier and others become poorer, but as a whole...

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Why bloggers are so negative Rather than getting into a discussion of whether blogs, or academic sociology, or movie reviews, should be more positive or negative, let’s get into the more interesting question of Why. Why is negativity such a standard response? 1. Division of labor. Within social science, sociology’s “job” is to confront us with the bad news, to push us to study inconvenient truths. If you want to hear good news, you can go listen to the...

Why statistical significance is worthless in science There are at least around 20 or so common misunderstandings and abuses of p-values and NHST [Null Hypothesis Significance Testing]. Most of them are related to the definition of p-value … Other misunderstandings are about the implications of statistical significance. Statistical significance does not mean substantive significance: just because an observation (or a more extreme observation) was unlikely...

When the herd turns  [embedded content]

Annie Lööf — en unken nyliberal som borde veta hut Att välkända nyliberaler som Alan Greenspan och Paul Ryan vurmar för den iskalla egoismens översteprästinnan Ayn Rand och hennes övermänniskoideal är kanske inte så förvånande. Men att Annie Lööf också gör det är kanske mer anmärkningsvärt. I Lööfs ögon är Rand “en av 1900-talets största tänkare”. I andras en av 1900-talets mest vämjeliga personer. Att fru Lööf ohöljt hyllar en psykopat som Ayn Rand och en...

The production function has been a powerful instrument of miseducation. The student of economic theory is taught to write Q = f(L, K) where L is a quantity of labor, K a quantity of capital and Q a rate of output of commodities. He is instructed to assume all workers alike, and to measure L in man-hours of labor; he is told something about the index-number problem in choosing a unit of output; and then he is hurried on to the next question, in the hope that he will forget to...

Karl-Bertil — räddaren i nöden  [embedded content]

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The most dangerous equation in the world Failure to take sample size into account and inferring causality from outliers can lead to incorrect policy actions. For this reason, Howard Wainer refers to the formula for the standard​ deviation of the mean the “most dangerous equation​ in the world.” For example, in the 1990s the Gates Foundation and other nonprofits advocated breaking up schools based on evidence that the best schools were small. To see the...