Lars P. Syll

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...

Unbiased estimates? Forget it! In realistic settings, unbiased estimates simply don’t exist. In the real world we have nonrandom samples, measurement error, nonadditivity, nonlinearity, etc etc etc. So forget about it. We’re living in the real world … It’s my impression that many practitioners in applied econometrics and statistics think of their estimation choice kinda like this: 1. The unbiased estimate. It’s the safe choice, maybe a bit boring and maybe...

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The real value of analogue economies Modelling by the construction of analogue economies is a widespread technique in economic theory nowadays … As Lucas urges, the important point about analogue economies is that everything is known about them … and within them the propositions we are interested in ‘can be formulated rigorously and shown to be valid’ … For these constructed economies, our views about what will happen are ‘statements of verifiable fact.’...

Probability vs Maximum Likelihood (student stuff) [embedded content] .[embedded content] Advertisements

On manipulability and causation If contributions made by statisticians to the understanding of causation are to be taken over with advantage in any specific field of inquiry, then what is crucial is that the right relationship should exist between statistical and subject-matter concerns …The idea of causation as consequential manipulation is apt to research that can be undertaken primarily through experimental methods and, especially to ‘practical science’...