Lars P. Syll

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....

Der Wind hat sich gedreht im Lande  [embedded content] Advertisements

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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”...

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 [embedded content] The reckless, untruthful, outrageous, incompetent & undignified buffoon Donald Trump is debasing the nation day after day. A grandmother — Liz DeCou — gets arrested in California for attempting to deliver toys and books to migrant children separated from their parents at the border. Sickening to see how decent people are being treated. Advertisements

In his new history of experimental social science — Randomistas: How radical researchers are changing our world — Andrew Leigh gives an introduction to the RCT (randomized controlled trial) method for conducting experiments in medicine, psychology, development economics, and policy evaluation. Although it mentions there are critiques that can be waged against it, the author does not let that shadow his overwhelmingly enthusiastic view on RCT. Among mainstream economists, this...