Lars P. Syll

Jon Elster and the dangers of excessive ambitions .[embedded content] Most mainstream economists want to explain social phenomena, structures and patterns, based on the assumption that the agents are acting in an optimizing — rational — way to satisfy given, stable and well-defined goals. The procedure is analytical. The whole is broken down into its constituent parts to be able to explain (reduce) the aggregate (macro) as the result of the interaction of...

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A philosopher’s look at science You will already be familiar with the fact that broad swathes of social science research are given over to establishing, analysing, generalising, theorising about and using statistical associations that are manipulated with the assumptions of probability theory. This makes sense if probabilities can be attached to broad swathes of the phenomena that social science is meant to deal with. But can they? Here we face the same...

Statistical assumptions and racial bias Our analysis indicates that existing empirical work in this area is producing a misleading portrait of evidence as to the severity of racial bias in police behavior. Replicating and extending the study of police behavior in New York in Fryer (2019), we show that the consequences of ignoring the selective process that generates police data are severe, leading analysts to dramatically underestimate or conceal entirely...

Mainstream medieval inflation medicine Inflation peaked back in June 2022, only three months after the Fed started hiking interest rates. At that time, the Fed’s policy rate had risen just 75 basis points, and no one knew how much higher it might go. In fact, we have no evidence that monetary policy had any significant effect on the course taken by prices – certainly not before the June 2022 turning point, and not thereafter, either. In modern medicine, a...

The poverty of fictional storytelling in statistics and econometrics  The most expedient population and data generation model to adopt is one in which the population is regarded as a realization of an infinite super population. This setup is the standard perspective in mathematical statistics, in which random variables are assumed to exist with fixed moments for an uncountable and unspecified universe of events … This perspective is tantamount to assuming a...

Sraffian economics — a critique After being tasked with editing David Ricardo’s Collected Works in 1930, Piero Sraffa, with the assistance of Maurice Dobb, published them between 1951 and 1973. This work earned him the 1961 Söderström Gold Medal from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For the edition, Sraffa wrote an interesting and thought-provoking introduction. Its purpose was to demonstrate that classical economists based their theory on the concept...

My problem with Michel Foucault, then, is not that he seeks to “move beyond” the welfare state, but that he actively contributed to its destruction, and that he did so in a way that was entirely in step with the neoliberal critiques of the moment. His objective was not to move towards “socialism,” but to be rid of it … In addition to the “dependency” it supposedly creates, Foucault believes that social security ultimately serves mainly the affluent. Thus, in a 1976 interview,...

Less is more — the process of elimination .[embedded content]

Why yours truly is a critical realist What properties do societies possess that might make them possible objects of knowledge for us? My strategy in developing an answer to this question will be effectively based on a pincer movement. But in deploying the pincer I shall concentrate first on the ontological question of the properties that societies possess, before shifting to the epistemological question of how these properties make them possible objects of...