Lars P. Syll

There are many kinds of useless economics held in high regard within mainstream economics establishment today. Few — if any — are less deserved than the macroeconomic theory/method — mostly connected with Nobel laureates Finn Kydland, Robert Lucas, Edward Prescott and Thomas Sargent — called calibration. In physics, it may possibly not be straining credulity too much to model processes as ergodic – where time and history do not really matter – but in social and historical...

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Some common misunderstandings about randomization Randomization is an alternative when we do not know enough to control, but is generally inferior to good control when we do. We suspect that at least some of the popular and professional enthusiasm for RCTs, as well as the belief that they are precise by construction, comes from misunderstandings about … random or realized confounding on the one hand and confounding in expectation on the other … The RCT...

Modern economics — a severe case of model Platonism That is the great thing about abstraction. Working with what can be called ‘flex price’ models does not imply that you think price rigidity is unimportant, but instead that it can often be ignored if you want to focus on other processes. Simon Wren-Lewis When applying deductivist thinking to economics, mainstream economists like Wren-Lewis usually set up ‘as if’ models based on a set of tight axiomatic...

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Deductivist modeling endeavours and an overly simplistic use of statistical and econometric tools are sure signs of the explanatory hubris that still haunts mainstream economics. In an interview Robert Lucas says the evidence on postwar recessions … overwhelmingly supports the dominant importance of real shocks. So, according to Lucas, changes in tastes and technologies should be able to explain the main fluctuations in e.g. the unemployment that we have seen during the last...

Tractability, truth, and ignorability Most attempts at causal inference in observational studies are based on assumptions that treatment assignment is ignorable. Such assumptions are usually made casually, largely because they justify the use of available statistical methods and not because they are truly believed. Marshall Joffe et al. An interesting (but from a technical point of view rather demanding) article on a highly questionable assumption used in...