Lars P. Syll

In need of medication [embedded content] In Trump-era US, reality sure beats fiction in the worst way possible, day after day. Advertisements

The main reason why almost all econometric models are wrong How come that econometrics and statistical regression analyses still have not taken us very far in discovering, understanding, or explaining causation in socio-economic contexts? That is the question yours truly has tried to answer in an article published in the latest issue of World Economic Association Commentaries: The processes that generate socio-economic data in the real world cannot just be...

Allt — och lite till — du vill veta om kausalitet Rolf Sandahls och Gustav Jakob Peterssons Kausalitet: i filosofi, politik och utvärdering är en synnerligen välskriven och läsvärd genomgång av de mest inflytelserika teorierna om kausalitet som används inom vetenskapen idag. Tag och läs! I den positivistiska (hypotetisk-deduktiva, deduktiv-nomologiska) förklaringsmodellen avser man med förklaring en underordning eller härledning av specifika fenomen ur...

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Hard and soft science — a flawed dichotomy The distinctions between hard and soft sciences are part of our culture … But the important distinction is really not between the hard and the soft sciences. Rather, it is between the hard and the easy sciences. Easy-to-do science is what those in physics, chemistry, geology, and some other fields do. Hard-to-do science is what the social scientists do and, in particular, it is what we educational researchers do....

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What are axiomatizations good for? Axiomatic decision theory was pioneered in the early 20th century by Ramsey (1926) and de Finetti (1931,1937), and achieved remarkable success in shaping economic theory … A remarkable amount of economic research is now centered around axiomatic models of decision … What have these axiomatizations done for us lately? What have we gained from them? Are they leading to advances in economic analysis, or are they perhaps...

Whereas the Great Depression of the 1930s produced Keynesian economics, and the stagflation of the 1970s produced Milton Friedman’s monetarism, the Great Recession has produced no similar intellectual shift. This is deeply depressing to young students of economics, who hoped for a suitably challenging response from the profession. Why has there been none? Krugman’s answer is typically ingenious: the old macroeconomics was, as the saying goes, “good enough for government work”...