Lars P. Syll

 [embedded content] In loving memory of Kristina. Advertisements

Is secular stagnation nothing but an excuse for flawed economic policies? There are many lessons to be learned as we reflect on the 2008 crisis, but the most important is that the challenge was – and remains – political, not economic: there is nothing that inherently prevents our economy from being run in a way that ensures full employment and shared prosperity. Secular stagnation was just an excuse for flawed economic policies. Unless and until the...

Do you think, because I am poor, I am soulless and heartless?  [embedded content] An absolutely ripping Mia Wasikowska in Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre Advertisements

Sweden​ and the perils of failed integration  [embedded content] Advertisements

Discrimination in the labour market In der Forschung zu Arbeitsmarktdiskriminierung existieren zwei theoretische Ansätze, die sich mit den Ursachen für diskriminierendes Verhalten von Arbeitgebern befassen: Theorien der präferenzbasierten und der statistischen Diskriminierung. Der amerikanische Ökonom und Soziologe Gary Becker hat erstmals den Begriff der „taste-based discrimination“ eingeführt um zu beschreiben, dass sich Arbeitgeber bei ihren...

Causal interaction and external validity As yours truly has repeatedly argued on this blog, randomized control trials (RCTs) usually do not provide evidence that their results are exportable to other target systems. The almost religious belief with which its propagators portray it, cannot hide the fact that RCTs cannot be taken for granted to give generalizable results. Randomized evaluations have become widespread in development economics in recent...

Laplace and the principle of insufficient reason (wonkish) After their first night in paradise, and having seen the sun rise in the morning, Adam and Eve were wondering if they were to experience another sunrise or not. Given the rather restricted sample of sunrises experienced, what could they expect? According to Laplace’s rule of succession, the probability of an event E happening after it has occurred n times is p(E|n) = (n+1)/(n+2). The probabilities...

The Grace of Undómiel  [embedded content] Advertisements

The gross substitution axiom Economics is perhaps more than any other social science model-oriented. There are many reasons for this — the history of the discipline, having ideals coming from the natural sciences (especially physics), the search for universality (explaining as much as possible with as little as possible), rigour, precision, etc. Mainstream economists want to explain social phenomena, structures and patterns, based on the assumption that the...

How to cope with the behavioural challenge How would you react if a renowned physicist, say, ​Richard Feynman, was telling you that sometimes force is proportional to acceleration and at other times it is proportional to acceleration squared? I guess you would be unimpressed. But actually, what most mainstream economists do amounts to the same strange thing when it comes to theory development and model modification. In mainstream economic theory,​...