Lars P. Syll

Statistics and econometrics are not very helpful for understanding economies A statistician may have done the programming, but when you press a button on a computer keyboard and ask the computer to find some good patterns, better get clear a sad fact: computers do not think. They do exactly what the programmer told them to do and nothing more. They look for the patterns that we tell them to look for, those and nothing more. When we turn to the computer for...

In plain terms, it is evident that if what is really the same factor is appearing in several places under various disguises, a free choice of regression coefficients can lead to strange results. It becomes like those puzzles for children where you write down your age, multiply, add this and that, subtract something else, and eventually end up with the number of the Beast in Revelation. Prof. Tinbergen explains that, generally speaking, he assumes that the correlations under...

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High school graduation (personal) Our youngest, Linnea, graduated from high school today. Congratulations​ from proud father. And here with brothers and sisters: Advertisements

I think the two most important microfoundation led innovations in macro have been intertemporal consumption and rational expectations. I have already talked about the former in an earlier post … [s]o let me focus on rational expectations …  [T]he adoption of rational expectations was not the result of some previous empirical failure. Instead it represented, as Lucas said, a consistency axiom … I think macroeconomics today is much better than it was 40 years ago as a result of...

Globalization — a win-lose situation ZEIT ONLINE: Einigen Menschen würde es ohne Globalisierung also besser gehen? Holger Görg: Ja. Das ist das große Problem der Globalisierung. ZEIT ONLINE: Was kann man dagegen tun? Görg: Da sind die Staaten gefordert. Es muss ein soziales Sicherungsnetz geben, das die Menschen auffängt und ihnen ein Einkommen garantiert, wenn sie ihren Job verlieren. So wie in Deutschland und den meisten entwickelten Ländern. Aber das ist...

Two words say​ it all!  [embedded content] One cannot but grieve for a nation that has given us presidents like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and now is run by a witless clown. An absolute disgrace. Advertisements

Contrast explanations in economics For all scholars seriously interested in questions on what makes up a good scientific explanation, Alan Garfinkel’s Forms of Explanation (Yale University Press 1990) is a must-read. A lot of recent work done within different realist schools in theory of science — e.g. Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Richard W Miller and Tony Lawson — issue not so little from questions and problems posed by Garfinkel. Especially his advocacy...

There is a nice YouTube video with Tony O’Hagan interviewing Dennis Lindley. Of course, Dennis is a legend and his impact on the field of statistics is huge. [embedded content] At one point, Tony points out that some people liken Bayesian inference to a religion. Dennis claims this is false. Bayesian inference, he correctly points out, starts with some basic axioms and then the rest follows by deduction. This is logic, not religion. I agree that the mathematics of Bayesian...

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